a taxi down to the industrial pier where we boarded an ancient, scabby work boat that tooled us out to the Wave Venture, anchored a few miles offshore (see Figure 7-26). Approach- ing the vessel I was amazed at its size: a 142-meter cable-laying and maintenance ship, originally built as a passenger ferry in 1982 and con- verted to a cable ship in 2000. She can stay at sea for as long as 40 days without resupplying food and equipment for her 62 crew members. We boarded the ship via a starboard boarding ladder and gathered on the fantail, where Martin Swaffield, master of the vessel, began the tour. We climbed up several flights of stairs to the driving bridge where he Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Transport Technologies Chapter 7 Figure 7-26 Asia Global Crossing's Wave Venture explained the principal responsibilities of the ship and its crew. "Our pri- mary job is cable maintenance. We locate a cable, pull it up from the bot- tom, find the problem, repair it, and drop it back on the sea floor. We also lay cable: We can put down as much as 15 kilometers a day depending on the makeup of the bottom and obstacles we might have to go around, and we do it all remotely. As you'll see in a few minutes we have a robot that goes down and does all of the trenching and labor for us." I asked him what the biggest problem was that they faced. "Unexploded ordinance," he responded. "We often pull up a cable that has been fouled in a fishing net, and in an attempt to free the drag net, the fishing boat damages the cable. Unfortunately, a lot of unexploded ordinance has been dropped into the ocean over the years, sometimes intentionally, sometimes by accident. It's often the case that when we drag up the cable we find an unexploded mine or bomb in the net, dangling behind the stern of the ship. At that point we stop all operations, call whate