Thirty Hours Aboard the Castoro 6

The thirty hours that I spent aboard the Castoro 6 in April 1980 were a rare gift for a landlubber like me, a man to whom the sea is just something you experience during summer vacations in Liguria, or the transfigured entity that emerges from the pages of Coleridge, Conrad, Verne, and Melville. In particular, the latter two writers came to mind frequently during my all too short stay aboard: to be specific, I thought of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and especially of the “guided tour” that Captain Nemo gives Professor Aronnax through the mechanical bowels of the Nautilus, and a phrase (first impressed on my memory more than thirty years ago) by Cesare Pavese, in his translator’s foreword to Moby-Dick: “Melville . . . is a man whose acquaintance with life goes well beyond the ‘long Vaticans and street-stalls,’ and who knows that the greatest poems are those told by unlettered sailors on the forecastle.”

The two quotes, or perhaps I should say the two literary hooks, should be taken at face value, like any quote. The sailors manning the Castoro are anything but illiterate: in fact, they’re marine engineers, a species of human that didn’t exist in Melville’s day, but which Verne foresaw and predicted with that mysterious sixth sense of a technological visionary, allowing him to anticipate, fifty or a hundred years ahead of his time, the use of helicopters in wartime, television, rockets hurtling to the Moon (and specifically from Cape Canaveral!) with their human crew, and a submarine that was, all things considered, quite plausible.

I hope that Captain Pietro Costanzo will forgive me for likening him to the misanthropic, vindictive, Luciferian Captain Nemo; nor, for that matter, is the Castoro a submarine, though, like the Nautilus, it has a belly teeming with wonders. Like submarines (and in fact it is technically designated a “semi-submersible”), and, like the whalers of both yesterday and today, it is a non-ship ship, a ship for which sailing is an ancillary task, taken for granted, because it is basically designed for other, clearly defined purposes. The devices it contains, in fact, stir wonder because of the extreme refinement with which they have been adapted to a specific and unusual objective: to lay along the sea floor, from Tunisia to Sicily, at depths never previously attained, a rigid steel pipe sheathed in cement, manipulating it as if it were as light and flexible as a rubber tube.

The history of technology shows us that, when it comes to dealing with new challenges, both scientific training and great precision are necessary but hardly enough. Two other traits are required, experience and inventive imagination, but in the profession of exploiting natural gas, quite a recent one, experience stretches back not over centuries or millennia; rather, it is compressed into decades, or even shorter spans. It is far shorter than a human lifetime, and fathers have nothing to teach their sons; it is impossible to rely upon the slow quasi-Darwinian evolution that has transformed firearms in the course of five centuries, or the automobile in the course of one. Experience demands trial and error, but here there is no time to make mistakes and correct them. What must prevail is imagination, which works by leaps, in short periods, through radical and rapid mutations. But no aspect of worthwhile experience should ever be wasted, even experience dating back to the earliest times; just as our body has inherited the genetic mechanism and the proteinaceous structure of single-cell organisms, and just as the automobile incorporated the design of the horse-drawn carriage, likewise on the Castoro 6 it is possible to discern the presence of curious and illustrious innovative ideas that date back to the dawn of our civilization: stilt houses, the double hull of the catamaran. This, too, is something to think about: like the great ideas and the deep problems of philosophy (whether matter is infinitely divisible; whether the universe is finite or infinite, eternal or perishable; whether we possess free will or are slaves), so, too, the great inventions of technology are transformed but never die. The lever, the wheel, and the roof have survived over the millennia; no metal has yet fallen into disuse and, if anything, countless new uses have been found for the most ancient metals. It would be difficult to think of a single obsolete plastic material, while the oldest among them—the phenolic resins and polystyrene—remain just as important as ever.

Much the same thing can be said about the men aboard the Castoro. Just as the vessel is singular, unlike anything else on Earth, so is its crew entirely sui generis; or perhaps I should say its crews, because there are three squads of 150 men each, which rotate shifts, with two squads on board (for twenty-eight days, Sundays and holidays included, twelve hours on duty and twelve hours off every day) and one squad on dry land, with fourteen days off. It’s a composite crew, including welders, mechanics, electricians, electrical engineers, crane operators, mechanical engineers, fitters, and roustabouts, as well as stewards and seamen. Nonetheless, the separation (the “interface”) between sailors and industrial workers and, higher up the hierarchy, between ship’s officers and engineers is anything but distinct, because the Castoro’s method of navigation is a strange one.

From a ship proper, what we expect is that it sail quickly, along a straight line, and only rarely reverse engines. The Castoro, on the other hand, sails forward only when it is on its way to a worksite; to tell the truth, it really makes little sense even to use the terms “fore” and “aft,” “forward” and “reverse,” when speaking of the Castoro: it has no real bow, though the end from which the pipe is lowered into the water is conventionally referred to as the bow, and therefore the vessel travels backward when laying pipe. It can move in all directions, because it has four orientable propellers, one at each corner of the lower hulls. It does not normally travel faster than six or seven knots; for this ship, stability and position are far more important than speed, because it is in fact an exceedingly sophisticated floating workshop. In other words: it must be capable of remaining stationary with respect to the sea floor and, more specifically, with respect to the pipe, with tolerances of no more than a few tenths of a meter; it mustn’t oscillate with the swell; it must remain oblivious of wind and current; and when it moves in order to lay pipe it must do so at a precisely controlled speed. So that this will occur with the necessary reliability, a refined system of automation has been put in place, and it ensures that, every time a length of pipe is “launched,” the twelve winches of the twelve anchors (formidable anchors, weighing between twenty and twenty-five metric tons each) and the four propeller-engine groups work in concert to make certain that the pipe slides into the water without being exposed to shocks greater than those allowed by the specifications and strength of the materials. The moment of the “launch”—that is, the advancing of the pipe, which takes place (if everything is working properly) about every ten minutes—is an unforgettable spectacle: at a command given by the electronic brain that supervises the operation, the colossal winches all grind into motion simultaneously, winching in the stern cables and winching out the bow cables, and the forty-thousand-metric-ton bulk of the Castoro 6 begins to move ponderously toward the coast of Sicily, by exactly twelve meters, that is, the length of a section of pipe. But the motion is so smooth and gentle that those on board don’t even sense it. They only see the pipe slide forward, and believe that the pipe is moving while the ship stands still. This is a concrete illustration of Galilean relativity, and one is reminded of Dante’s description of the Garisenda Tower, which seems to lean toward the ground when wind-driven clouds move behind it.

Automation is a young art, and naturally its practitioners are young men. But the older men, too, have often proved invaluable, and not only in the more traditional professions, working as mariners and stewards: their experience, attained in the course of the years in a wide variety of jobs, has shown itself to be extremely useful in dealing with unforeseen circumstances; indeed, it would be naïve to expect that in such a complex system, necessarily working in such unusual conditions, everything should function according to plan and without accidents. I was told about two episodes, two unforeseen circumstances, in fact, that prove the importance even now of experience and inventive imagination when it becomes necessary to solve a new problem quickly, and “with the resources on board.”

The foundation of the Castoro’s work is welding. It is basically a welding shop some hundred and fifty meters (five hundred feet) long; distributed along the length of the pipe, as it gradually advances, are eight welding stations, and the joints of the sections of pipe are welded, in part automatically and in part by hand, according to extremely sophisticated welding techniques. Prior to the “launch,” and once the welding is complete, a radiographic quality check must be performed: if the weld is flawless the pipe continues to advance; if any defects are found, they are quickly repaired. The X-ray generator is housed in a device that runs on a wheeled undercarriage inside the pipe, or perhaps it is more accurate to say: that remains stationary with respect to the ship, while the pipe moves around it; this device is held in place by a cable, and because of its elongated shape it has been dubbed “the piglet.” At one point during pipe laying, for reasons that remain mysterious, the piglet suddenly disappeared: the cable must have broken, the wheeled undercarriage rolled down the slope of the pipe, and the very costly piece of equipment was now three hundred meters away. This was very bad news: aside from the necessary cessation of pipe laying (I was informed that one minute of work on the Castoro 6 costs 280,000 lire!), the piglet was almost entirely blocking the pipe, and it had to be removed as quickly as possible, at all costs.

The top technicians gathered, and various suggestions were put forth, the most beguiling of which was this: make a phone call to Tunisia, have the Tunisians insert a sphere made of rubber or some other pliable material into the pipe, and then pump compressed air into the pipe behind it, the way that a pneumatic postal system works. The ball would reach the piglet on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea and shoot it out. They were still talking this over when a crew member stepped forward; he was a former fisherman, and it struck him as obvious that the piglet ought to be fished out. His suggestion didn’t seem all that straightforward to implement, but it was simple, quick, and wouldn’t cost more than a few thousand lire; the man was accompanied to the welding shop, where he had a large hook made and ballasted it with a weight. He inserted hook and weight into the mouth of the pipe, and after a few minutes of patient and expert attempts, he hooked the piglet and hauled it out of the pipe.

The second episode was on a cyclopean scale. As mentioned above, the positioning and the forward motion of the Castoro 6 rely upon a complex system of anchorage. The twelve gigantic anchors are deployed in a radial arrangement around the ship, and normally the ship “walks” on its twelve anchors: as it moves, dragging itself along the cables, it eventually reaches a point that is too close to the cables nearest Sicily, and, when it does, those anchors are raised and then dropped again farther forward, while the anchors on the Tunisian side are moved closer to the ship. The timing, angles, and distances of the repositioning of the anchors are all dictated by the on-board computer, and the operation is performed by tugboats that follow and circle the Castoro like dutiful butlers. The mooring cables (steel, three-inch diameter) are 2700 meters long. Ultimately, the Castoro, along with its anchors marked by the corresponding buoys, the tugboats, and the supply boats* that run back and forth from dry land, bringing the vessel pipes, fuel, and other provisions, covers many square kilometers of water.

On a night of intense bad weather, one of the buoys just mentioned disappeared: it thus became impossible to locate with any precision the anchor that was beneath it, and hence to move it when its turn came. Apparently, the buoy had been damaged in some way: it was an unsinkable type of buoy, but its buoyancy had clearly been compromised, and the weight of the cable connecting it to the anchor held it somewhere in the middle of the water column, at a point unknown in terms of both location and depth. This, too, was a fishing problem, but a problem of blind fishing; also, the anchor down on the seabed weighed twenty-five metric tons, plus at least another ten metric tons of chain. The problem was solved the way a blind man would have solved it—that is, by groping. One of the tugboats rigged a large hook and fastened it under the heavy steel cable, still visible for a few meters, running from the Castoro all the way down to the anchor; then the tugboat started moving through terrifying seas, letting the hook slide along the cable, keeping the hook cable under pressure. The hook descended on a slant, following the catenary of the cable for almost two kilometers, until it reached the massive links of the chain connecting the cable to the anchor: it hooked into the first link, and the powerful gantry winch of the tugboat hoisted anchor and chain just high enough to bring the damaged buoy back to the surface.

Now, these are the “poems” to which Pavese alluded when speaking of Melville. They were told to me not on the forecastle (I don’t believe the Castoro 6 even has one) but, rather, at a cafeteria table, over glasses of good wine; and not by unlettered sailors but by Captain Costanzo and the other men of the crew, some young, some less so, cybernetic engineers just entering the working world, machinists proud of every single bolt on their equipment, blue-collar seamen who have rediscovered the age-old virtues of competence put to the test and work well done in this colossal and uncommon undertaking. I hope none of them will be astonished or dismayed at the idea that their stories struck me as poetic. In fact, in their words, restrained, courteous, precise, and unemphatic, I heard an echo of the voice of another navigator and storyteller whose long-ago adventures have since become deathless poetry: a sailor who plied strange seas for ten years, and whose prime virtues, far greater than courage, which he certainly never lacked, were patience and resourceful ingenuity.