Synthetic rope replaces steel wire on deepwater support vessel, changing how crew work on deck
Stabbert Maritime has retrofitted its multipurpose offshore support vessel Ocean Guardian with a synthetic hoisting system after steel wire rope began dictating how and where crew could safely work during daily deepwater operations.
The Seattle-based operator runs Ocean Guardian on continuous subsea, survey, and scientific support missions to depths of 6,000 meters. At that depth and frequency, lifting is not an occasional event. It is a daily routine, and the properties of the hoisting rope directly affect how every other task on deck gets done.
Steel wire created three compounding problems. Snap-back risk from a parted line under load forced crews to maintain permanent exclusion zones around the rope during operations, meaning deck layout and task sequencing were driven by where people could not stand rather than where the work needed them. The lubrication steel wire requires under cyclic load migrated onto drums, sheaves, and surrounding deck surfaces, adding continuous cleaning to the crew’s workload. And at 6,000 meters of depth, the sheer weight of steel wire in the system raised the stored energy during spooling and load transitions, pushing handling procedures toward greater separation from the line.
Scaling up the existing steel-based setup was evaluated and set aside. Bigger winches would have meant a larger deck footprint, tighter operating margins, and commissioning risk during the transition. “We weren’t trying to chase headline performance,” said Daniel Stabbert, CTO of Stabbert Maritime. “We needed a system that behaved predictably every day instead of one that people had to keep compensating for.”
The replacement system
Stabbert Maritime selected
, a hybrid synthetic hoisting rope from Hampidjan that incorporates Technora® aramid fibers from Teijin Aramid. The rope runs on a fully electric deepwater capstan winch designed by Parkburn, a specialist in lifting systems built for continuous deepwater duty. The winch separates traction from storage and fits within the vessel’s existing power envelope and deck footprint, with no changes to foundations or auxiliary systems required.
Parkburn’s Sam Bull said the winch was designed around the whole operating environment, not just the rope’s rated performance in isolation. “Real performance is governed by the entire operating environment: winch type, sheave geometry, spoolers, fleeting angles, bearing surfaces, system dynamics such as speed and active heave compensation, and ultimately the unknown conditions delivered by mother nature,” he said.
To back that up with data, Hampidjan commissioned independent cyclic bend-over-sheave testing through NORCE Research at the Mechatronics Innovation Lab in Norway. Testing ran repeated bending cycles at elevated temperature without external cooling, to replicate the thermal loading the rope sees during prolonged offshore operations. Senior researcher Ellen Nordgård-Hansen said the programme focused on heat and fatigue progression because those are the primary mechanisms behind hoisting rope degradation in service, not peak load in a single test.
Once the system went into regular use aboard Ocean Guardian, the difference was practical and immediate. Spooling and empty-hook recovery became routine. Line behaviour stayed consistent as loads changed. During extended active heave compensation operations, the rope did not generate the heat buildup or surface contamination that steel wire produces under the same conditions.
With no lubricant transferring to deck surfaces and less energy in the line during handling, the work area around the winch did not require repeated clearance between lifts. Tasks that would previously have been delayed or re-sequenced around hoisting activity ran at the same time. “What stood out was how little attention the system needed once it was running,” Stabbert said. “We weren’t constantly adjusting how we worked around it.”
For vessels running deepwater lifting cycles day in and day out, the cumulative effect of a rope system that demands constant compensation from the people around it adds up. Crew time spent managing exclusion zones, cleaning lubricant, and re-sequencing tasks around the line is crew time not spent on the operation itself. The Ocean Guardian experience suggests that for operators planning vessels or refits for extended deepwater work, how a hoisting system integrates with day-to-day deck activity deserves as much attention as its rated depth or load capacity.
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is manufactured by Hampidjan and incorporates Technora® aramid fibers from Teijin Aramid. The deepwater capstan winch was designed by Parkburn.
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