Ship Loading . The loading of the ship is not difficult if the ship- 

 ping reel fits the cable paying machine. The reel can be simply lifted 

 by a heavy crane and positioned on the shipboard cable winch. If the 

 shipping reel is not to be used on the winch, the cable may be trans- 

 ferred from the shipping reel to the ship winch storage drum. If in-line 

 packages are present, a third flange is installed in the winch drum to 

 separate the cable from the packages. If the cable assembly is unloaded 

 from a pan to the ship winch drum, the procedure is similar. However, 

 more often, the cable is unloaded from a shipping pan and stored in the 

 ship's tank. Sometimes a reel of cable is loaded onto a tank through the 

 ship winch. The shipboard cable handling winch may consist of a couple 

 of bull wheels, or a traction drum with fleeting knives, a linear puller 

 is equipped with some cable ships for loading and deployment. Sheaves 

 with large "V" shaped grooves and chutes have been used for guiding the 

 cable during the loading process. Formation of kinks have been observed 

 when double-armored cable was being transferred from a flatbed truck to 

 the ship's tank. 



Cable Deployment and Retrieval . During deployment the cable is 

 taken out of the tank or the storage drum, through a puller or traction 

 winch, over a large sheave or a chute, and into the sea. During water 

 column suspension, the weight of the cable and the payload generates high 

 static tension in the cable. The ship motion causes large dynamic fluc- 

 tuations of the line tension. The cable tension is usuallv monitored by 

 a dynamometer. 



For bottom cable laying, the ship steams at a predetermined speed 

 while cable is being payed out at the same rate. If the cable is being 

 laid on a sloping seafloor, proper ad-justment of oavout speed is neces- 

 sary for minimum tension at the lower end. If the cable does not reach 

 the shore, the cable is cut and lowered to the seafloor. It is later 

 retrieved and spliced to another cable. Kinks have been found in armored 

 cable taken out of the ship tank for deployment. Kinks also exist in 

 cables after thev are lowered to seafloor. 



A cable system may be retrieved for splicing, repairing and storage. 

 Usually, it is recovered and stored on a drum or in a tank. Some opera- 

 tions may require that the cable be suspended below the ship or barge for 

 an extended period of time. Only a small percentage of the cable layed 

 on the seafloor has been retrieved. The cable retrieved often has had 

 kinks . 



Deployment Discussion 



A review of many unsuccessful deployments of underwater cable systems 

 was made. It is concluded that many handling errors could have been 

 avoided if there had been a better understanding of the cable rotational 

 properties, the handling and storage hardware, and the cable loadings dur- 

 ing deployment. Through interviews with telephone cable laving companies, 

 offshore service companies, cable manufacturers, and Navy cable users, 

 and through a literature search, valuable information was accumulated and 

 is summarized in this section. 



36 



