Telstra Saturn cable makes history for Seaworks

Friday 19th January 2001

COASTAL FESTOON: Seaworks divers pick up buoys on Wellington' s Lyall Bay beach as the cable-layer Searanger lays the first festoon of cross-strait cable for Telstra Saturn's new fibre-optic system

By Ray Lilley

After making history by laying the country's biggest coastal festoon of fibre-optic bandwidth cable, local marine company Seaworks is bidding on contracts in Hong Kong, Shanghai and the Baltic.

The company expects to complete the Telstra Saturn backbone fibre-optic cable linking six centres from Auckland to Christchurch with 1000km of high-speed telecommunications link by the end of May. It will also lay a separate 200km of fibre-optic cable for Telecom for a new inter-island link from Levin to Nelson during the same period.

Between them, the two contracts are worth up to $30 million for the company which began with two divers on the old ECNZ's Cook Strait power cable upgrade of the early 1980s.

"These are unique projects for New Zealand - such festoon cabling has never happened here before," Seaworks founder and director Bill Day said.

"Festoons" are short coastal runs of cable linking cities, a niche market Seaworks has decided to exploit.

The company is hunting for similar offshore work for the $26 million cable-laying ship Searanger from mid-year, once the two contracts are complete.

"Our industry is watching us pretty carefully on this project. We believe if we make a reasonable fist of it there will be a lot of work generated as a result of that. People are just watching and waiting to see how these guys go."

Already the purpose-built vessel and its cable-burying plough had exceeded expectations on the first leg of the Telstra Saturn cable project, which began on January 4 off Wellington's Lyall Bay.

Eleven calm days later the toughest leg of the contract, Cook Strait, was complete as the Searanger reached the South Island shore at Cape Campbell. A day later 140kph winds lashed the capital and the strait.

Mr Day admits a combination of luck, location and tight business focus helped launch his $35-million-a-year- turnover company into the fibre-optic-s cable industry.

He acknowledged that Telstra Saturn had been instrumental "in getting a local contractor into the game. It wanted to develop a local contractor as part of its commitment here." It had helped by advancing finance for the Searanger.

Half of Seaworks' business is cable laying and maintenance and half is supplying and maintaining oil and gas rigs from Maui to the Nigerian coast.

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