COLUMN | I Ain’t Coming Back: Dive vessel ex-Matisse to Nigeria; Olympic Notos leaves wind for oil; Edda Wind goes private; Astro and Allseas buy; Fredriksen flips in China; whistleblower wins against SBM [Offshore Accounts]

Who doesn’t love a country song which opens “I'm a redneck, 'cause I drink beer and I dip Skoal”?

That would be the opening line to I Ain’t Coming Back, the new single from Morgan Wallen featuring Post Malone, which also includes the great chorus, “There's a lot of reasons I ain't Jesus, but the main one is that I ain't coming back…”

It’s a song about toxic break-ups and heartache, drinking whiskey and a ’97 Chevy. Who hasn’t felt that walking away was a good move at least once in their life?

In fact, there’s a lot of people, companies and ships changing course this month.

Not coming back to Ultra Deep, not coming back to China

For first class subsea intelligence there’s only one port of call, Ian McIntosh’s first hand Subsea Newswire.

It never ceases to amaze me that this excellent publication manages more timely updates on diving, construction and remotely operated vehicles, and better market intelligence than many of the major brokerages, with dozens more staff and deeper pockets.

Tiny Aberdeen-based Strategic Offshore Research puts Clarksons, in particular, to shame.

Last week’s breaking story was about stranded Chinese subsea assets leaving China at last, and they ain’t coming back.

Nigeria’s Marine Platforms has signed a long-term charter on the dive support vessel (DSV) formerly known as Ultra Deep Matisse, when it was marketed by ill-fated Ultra Deep Solutions (UDS). The 143-metre long, 2023-built dive support and construction vessel is now known as China Merchants Pioneer, and is already underway to Cape Town, as per tracking data.

Mr McIntosh reports that Mermaid Subsea Services of Thailand will be providing the divers and dive system management for the Nigerian disponent owners.

Mermaid had already taken over the term charter of the former UDS DSV Van Gogh, as we reported in April 2022, when UDS hit financial issues. That vessel is now working in Brunei.

Picasso is a picture for DCN

The 2018-built, 120-metre long Picasso was taken by Holland’s DCN Diving at the end of 2024, and is on contract in the Arabian Gulf, along with the Lichtenstein, which is now managed by Viridian Maritime of Singapore on behalf of China Merchants.

These are high-specification, high-value vessels now enjoying six-digit day rates. Picasso features a twin-bell saturation diving system (rated to 300 metres), a SAAB Seaeye Cougar XTC 1447 ROV for use in over 1,000 msw, a 140-ton active heave-compensated (AHC) crane with 3,000-metre depth capacity, as well as 1,300 square metres of clear deck space, helideck and accommodation for 130 personnel.

There are still issues of profitability about the diving industry, however.

Mermaid reported its first quarter 2025 results recently. Despite turning over US$117 million in the January to March period, the company still made a loss of US$7.8 million, and it only achieved a profit in the fourth quarter of 2024 by reversing an accounting impairment. It has borrowings of over US$105 million, mainly from its parent company.

You would hope that at this stage in the offshore upcycle, profitability would be higher.

Then there was one

Only one vessel now remains under UDS control, Andy Warhol, which is a single-bell DSV. According to the first hand Subsea Newswire, this 2018-built vessel was almost chartered by Switzerland’s Deepwave.

Deepwave is a small player with two chartered in vessels, Jade, and the 97-metre, 2021-built Edda Savanah, which is contracted from Clear Ocean Partners and Pelagic Partners under Golden Energy Offshore management, after it was flipped by Norwegian magnate John Fredriksen (more on him below…).

Andy Warhol remains in northern China under the Chinese flag. UDS has now deleted all its social media posts.

Saipem takes another, Shen Da Hao ain't coming back

It wasn’t just China Merchants Pioneer leaving China, however. Saipem has chartered the ice-class, 184-metre long, DP3 construction vessel Shen Da Hao from its Chinese state owners, COES Shanghai Salvage.

This is a beast of a vessel, a newly delivered “2025 build,” which boasts an 800-tonne AHC crane capable of working in 3,000 metres of water, a 550-ton vertical lay tower, and the capacity to handle up to 4,000 tons of rigid reeled pipes up to 23 inches (58 cm) in diameter.

That ship has also left China and is sailing for Cape Town. The COES Shanghai Salvage brochure for Shen Da Hao is here. The vessel was originally slated for delivery three years ago, but was delayed in the yard until a customer could be found.

Another windfarm operations vessel ain’t coming back to wind

In February, we asked whether the commissioning service operation vessel (CSOV) Norwind Gale should be renamed Noroil Gale, after the wind turbine support arrived in Brazil to perform oil and gas work for Brazilian player Compagnie Maritime Monégasque (CMM).

We highlighted that the fixture demonstrated how a shortage of subsea vessels is encouraging wind farm vessel owners to take on walk-to-work (W2W) roles for the expanding fleet of service operation vessels (SOVs) that are being delivered without windfarm contracts.

There is now an order book of nearly 100 such SOVs and CSOVs, and a concern about a slow-down of new offshore wind projects. The versatile AHC gangways and 3D cranes are as useful servicing offshore platforms as they are commissioning wind turbines.

Last week my colleague Jens Karsten reported that Olympic Notos, a 2024-built CSOV operated by Norway's Olympic Subsea and built at Ulstein Verft, would be leaving the wind sector.

The ship has been chosen as the W2W vessel that will service Aker BP’s unmanned production platform Munin in the Yggdrasil area in the Norwegian North Sea under a five-year firm contract plus an additional five yearly optional extensions, starting in early 2026.

With such a large orderbook of CSOVs, and with Taiwan’s Dong Fang Offshore ordering a third CSOV at Vard earlier this month to add to the burgeoning supply side of the equation, we sense more and more windfarm vessels will be seeing oil and gas service. Headlines like “Equinor threatens cancellation of New York offshore wind project after Trump order” really don’t give confidence to investors in newbuild wind vessels today.

However, versatile, modern, high-specification ships can move seamlessly to other sectors.

Whether they will still be worth their US$60 million price tags in two or three years remains to be seen. The last offshore overbuilding cycle saw platform supply vessels (PSVs) ordered for US$40 million eventually sell for half that price when they were delivered. Let’s see.

Edda Wind – ain’t sticking around in them there public markets

One of my best ever headlines was the one which compared shipping magnates John Fredriksen and Idan Ofer to social media influencers flogging diet teas for their participation in the initial public offering of Edda Wind as “cornerstone investors” when the company listed in Oslo in 2021.

Edda Wind’s first day of trading in November 2021 saw its shares trade at just over NOK31 (US$3.00).

Despite a large fleet expansion programme, Edda Wind has struggled to be profitable. Last month, the shares were selling for less than half the first day value, at a low of NOK15.10 (US$1.45) on April 4.

Goodbye founding shareholder, goodbye CEO

Along the way, the company’s founding investor, Østensjø Wind, a wholly owned subsidiary of Norwegian offshore player and tug owner Østensjø, decided to bail. In May 2024, Østensjø agreed to sell 21,300,000 shares in Edda Wind at a price of NOK24.50 (US$2.36) per share, completely exiting its position in Edda Wind.

In December, Edda Wind announced an “organisational update” that its CEO, Kenneth Walland, was leaving his role at very short notice, effective January 1, 2025, “as he transitions into retirement.”

Let’s take this private in a mandatory and unconditional way

Now the three remaining anchor investors, being John Fredriksen’s Geveran Trading, Idan Ofer’s EPS Ventures and Wilhelmsen New Energy, have decided to take Edda Wind private. The trio have formed a joint holding company called Electric AS, which has now made an unconditional and mandatory cash offer to buy all outstanding shares in Edda Wind.

On May 2, Electric announced that it had acquired 1,516,178 shares of Edda Wind at an average price of NOK22.99 (US$2.21) per share. This meant that, together, Electric and the three shareholders controlled 120,246,116 shares, representing approximately 93 per cent of the outstanding shares in Edda Wind, permitting them to squeeze out any minority shareholders with a compulsory purchase.

By May 15, they had hit 95.2 per cent ownership. The company will be delisted from the Oslo Stock Exchange, which means that we will no longer have a window into the profitability (or not) of the SOV and CSOV businesses.

As per its 2024 annual report, Edda Wind eked out a net profit of around US$4 million in 2024 on an asset base of close to US$800 million. The company has five CSOVs in service in April 2025, plus two SOVs and five more CSOVs under construction, following the sale of the older SOV Mistral Enabler last month and the sale of her sister vessel Edda Passat in March 2024.

One suspects that this chronic lack of sustained profitability is the reason why the company’s shares have slumped since it was listed. Instead, the parties taking it private made the following claim in the offer announcement:

“...a key hinderance for Edda Wind as a publicly listed company has been the concentrated ownership situation resulting in a low free float and poor stock liquidity. Following a series of equity capital raises, it has become evident to the three largest shareholders that it will be challenging to continue investing and scaling the company in a public setting.”

Frederiksen's flip in China

Not content with quickly flipping the subsea vessels Edda Savanah and Edda Sphynx to Pelagic and Clear Ocean last year, Mr Frederiksen has now cashed out of two of the four 150-ton AHC crane Salt Ship-designed newbuild subsea ships that he ordered at the Wuchang Shipbuilding Industry Group in China last year through his Seatankers Management company.

Fearnleys reported that Dutch construction player Allseas has bought the duo for a substantial premium and that they will be delivered in the fourth quarter of next year as the first in the new wave of newbuildings in the subsea/ocean energy segment.

Let’s see whether the flip of the third and fourth vessels happens. Aside from his disappointing experience with Edda Wind and with the massive accommodation ship Edda Fortis, Mr Fredriksen is a master asset player. The flip to Allseas suggests that the subsea space is only just hotting up.

No one ever got poor flipping ships on the slipway for a profit before they have even been delivered.

The next frontier – 90 ton anchor handlers?

Meanwhile the market for offshore new builds continues to “drip, drip” into life. Ain’t no coming back to the days of empty orderbooks.

Last week, Indian port operator Adani’s Astro Offshore subsidiary launched Astro Sagittarius in China and the company has also taken ownership of her sister vessel Astro Sculptor. Astro says that it expects both anchor handlers will be fully operational from July 2025.

The ships are 65-metre long, diesel-electric DP2 AHTS designs, delivering 90 tonnes of bollard pull and equipped with smart notation for real-time performance monitoring and operational efficiency. See the launch video here.

No sooner than the Astro ships have left the slip than Simon Liang’s Sinopacific announced it was building four SPA90 design 90-ton bollard pull AHTS with diesel-electric propulsion and 450 square metres of deck space. The company said it had signed shipyard contracts in March for delivery of the first anchor handler in September 2026.

That order comes on top of the eight speculative PSVs the company is building in China.

Drip, drip, drip.

Jonathan Taylor has his day in court against SBM

One of the longest running whistleblowing and corruption claims in the offshore industry seems to be coming to an end, with vindication for the man who exposed the floating production giant SBM’s culture of corruption across multiple jurisdictions.

On May 7, 2025, the District Court in Amsterdam determined that SBM Offshore was unlawful in describing its former staff member Jonathan Taylor as a “blackmailer” and as someone who, “made an attempt at extortion.”

The court ordered SBM to make a pre-worded statement of rectification reflecting the findings and to publish it on the homepage of its company website and in the Dutch newspaper NRC. It is indeed on the company website on the date this piece was written (scroll to the bottom).

If they had not published this humbling apology, SBM would have been obliged to pay Mr Taylor €50,000 (US$56,000) per day, up to a capped amount of €500,000 (US$560,000).

The legal battle is not over with this judgement, however. The Amsterdam District Court has ordered SBM to pay damages to the whistleblower and the amount will be calculated by the court in due course.

Prior to such damages being calculated, the matter will be judged by the Amsterdam Appeal Court, including Mr Taylor’s claim that SBM is liable for all the consequences of SBM’s actions vis-à-vis him, including his lengthy detention in Croatia under an Interpol red notice issued by Monaco-based SBM’s complaint to the authorities there.

“For many years I have been looking forward to the day that SBM publicly rectifies the false statements it made about me, on the homepage of its website," Mr Taylor wrote to Baird Maritime. "Finally, that day has come. Step by step justice is being done."

As we have highlighted, the role of whistleblowers is tough. Mr Taylor began this journey 13 years ago.

Others, like Sergei Magnitsky, paid an even greater price.

No comment on latest ferry fiasco update

I simply reproduce the latest BBC coverage of the Scottish ferry fiasco:

 “The delivery date for Glen Rosa, the second of two dual-fuel CalMac ferries being built by the nationalised Ferguson shipyard, has been put back by up to nine months.

"The cost of the ship has also risen – by up to £35 million (US$45 million) – meaning the two ships will cost upwards of £460 million (US$611 million) if written-off loans are included, more than four-and-a-half times the original contract price.”

Those hundreds of millions ain't coming back.

As Morgan Wallen puts it, “I might be a lot of things, but I ain't your savin' grace.”

Background reading listening

The previous Post Malone and Morgan Wallen collaboration was I Had Some Help, which you can listen to here. Post Malone is proof that you really shouldn’t get facial tattoos, kids. Not even if you cast yourself as a knight in armour in a music video for Circles watched 734 million times.

Parody and satire are some of the most powerful weapons against tyranny. The Marsh Family’s take on “Pamela Bondi” set to the tune of “The One and Only” is a piece of political music at its best, featuring revised lyrics like, “The rule of law has died, but they will make shedloads on the side,” and, “You bet: the bribe can be a huge jet.”

Best delete the link from your YouTube history before you arrive at JFK, however…

We will be doing our summer reading, film and podcast recommendations in a few weeks, so drop us a line with your recommendations.