Logistica: Orca Single-Voyage Tow to Alang

In early 2022 Afrishore was engaged by Logistica Inc. to coordinate and secure the full regulatory clearance chain required to extract the semi-submersible Mobile Offshore Unit Orca from anchorage off Mossel Bay and dispatch her on a single-voyage delivery tow to Alang, India for recycling. Ownership had just transferred to Logistica from the previous custodian; the contracted towing vessel AHTS Hulk II was already en route at significant daily cost; and a 23-day operational window had been imposed on the rig's continued anchorage. Every outstanding approval, sub-sea preparation and tow handover had to fit inside that envelope.

Within the window Afrishore took ownership of five parallel regulatory workstreams: South African maritime authority clearances culminating in the Certificate of Inspection for tow; coastal-environmental endorsement of the underwater cleaning methodology – a scope with no recent precedent in Mossel Bay waters for an operation of this scale; Class and Flag re-issuance under a new Palau Certificate of Registry following the ownership transfer; appointment and approval of an experienced Marine Warranty Surveyor; and the full pre-tow document chain – towage manual, stability calculations, 49.6-day passage plan via Port Louis, bollard-pull and tow-wire records, magnetic-particle inspection of the tow-point welds, and Hull, P&I, Wreck Removal and Bunker Pollution insurance certificates. Most of these items had to be built from scratch in days rather than weeks, and several called for novel positioning where the regulator had no recent precedent of comparable scale to reference.

Every approval landed inside window. The coastal-environmental endorsement was secured on the day of the ownership transfer itself – a direct function of pre-positioning the technical case with the regulator weeks before handover. Class and tow certificates followed within days. The Marine Warranty Surveyor's Certificate of Approval and the maritime authority Certificate of Inspection were both issued on the same morning the tow departed – twelve days inside the SAMSA deadline. AHTS Hulk II picked up the tow that afternoon, with daily progress reporting maintained until the unit was clear of 200 nautical miles of the South African coast.

Compressed-timeline rig extractions from South African waters remain achievable where the contracting agent holds standing relationships with the maritime, coastal-environmental, class and warranty bodies involved, and where the underwater preparation scope can be defensibly limited to the minimum needed for safe towage. The Orca campaign was carried by the depth of those relationships and by the pre-positioning of the technical package weeks before the formal ownership transfer.