“We have ADS-B, Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast, which is what you can see on FlightRadar on your phone, and which we principally use for tracking helicopters, and AIS on the ships, so we can track the positions of everything in real time,” says Kaimes, pointing to the maps on the screens. He grabs the mouse to show us more.
“When you zoom out you can see how enormous the area is — it’s comparable with the county of Norfolk,” he says. “Several thousand years ago, there were people living out there, and you could walk across between England and Norway.”
Limited fishing activity
Dogger Bank is a large sandbank in the North Sea, and during periods of lower sea levels tens of thousands of years ago, it would have been exposed as dry land or shallow water.
Although the area has long been known by fishermen to be a productive fishing bank, today, the benthic environment is protected to conserve habitats important for biodiversity.
“There’s no bottom-interfering fishing activity or any kind of trawling allowed on the Dogger Bank,” says Kaimes. “There’s a byelaw that allows certain fishing activity out there, but it takes the form of strings of lobster pots and so on,” he says.
The VHF radio crackles into life.
“Bear with me a second,” he says. “What’s your message, over?”
“Good afternoon, we’re leaving the wind farm at one-three and proceeding to ABLE Seaton at nine tomorrow morning.”
It’s the captain of the wind turbine installation vessel Voltaire, a 21,000-tonne jack-up vessel with legs designed to keep it firmly standing on the seabed while installing wind turbines. It’s capable of lifting up to 3000 tonnes with its crane, which can reach higher than the Eiffel tower. They will be putting into Hartlepool the following morning for bunkering, loading and supplies.
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