If you liked The Grey Seas Under there is a second book by Mowat to look for "
The Serpent's Coil: An Incredible Story of Hurricane-Battered ships the Heroic Men Who Fought to Save Them (1961) ISBN 0-738-71577-8 "
Another writer you might enjoy is Cmdr. Edward Ellsberg. My two favorites of his are "On the Bottom. (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1929) and Under the Red Sea Sun. (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1946) "
Edit: Just started watching the dry-dock (re)floating. "Under the Red Sea Sun" describes an operation very similar to this with a twist, an unexploded mine in the base structure needed to be removed first.
I have read
The Serpent's Coil, but since I read
Grey Seas Under first, I used it as my example. I enjoyed reading both immensely.
Mowat's
The Boat that Wouldn't Float is an absolute riot, I've read it many times over and it never gets old.
Wait til he sees those 8" shackels
For a while my Dad worked offshore, he was on the record breaking rig that drilled the deepest hole in the deepest amount of water(turned out to be a dry hole). I believe the drill string weighted 2 million pounds (it was right at the absolute capacity of the rig), I think they lost 5 BHAs on that job (only about 5 million a pop...).
The cable used by the rig was made specially in England and after set amount of lifts, they unrolled it all and chopped it up for scrap. It was so big that a 5k lb forklift was used to move sections that were a few feet long.
They also only used clevis, or shackles if you prefer, for about a mouth. Then they chopped the old ones up and replaced them. There was nothing wrong with them, they just had 'green' paint and this is a 'blue' month, so they had to go.
My Dad asked the welder that was scrapping stuff if he could save some, welder said sure. Dad grabbed a few handfuls and stuffed them in his bag, his bag was so heavy with clevises that the bag got it's own seat on the helicopter.
The largest clevis probably weights 20lbs and you need a hammer to drive clip in the pin out, it's almost too big to be of any use to us.
The ammount of waste and stuff that gets scraped offshore is absolutely mind blowing.
