MV "BELLATRIX J" loading undersea cable

The heavy-lift vessel MV “BELLATRIX J” is designed for worldwide transport of very large and heavy loads. A not very complicated, but still no everyday cargo was recently shipped from the German Weser port Nordenham to Makassar/ Indonesia. On board were two fiber optic undersea cables with a total length of 1,900 kilometers and a total weight of 1,850 tons. The cables produced in Germany for being transported by sea were placed in the hold of the ship in two specially produced “cable tanks” of 12 and 14 meter in diameter which function like an oversized “cable drum”. To stow the tender load according to requirements, the cables were manually inserted into the cable tanks. The entire loading and unloading process took around 14 days each. In contrast, the sea transport around “half of the world” took only 38 days and went without any incidents.