Normandie 1 successfully lands in St Catherine

The Normandie 1 power cable finally landed in St Catherine’s Bay yesterday after the Dutch VBMS crew of the 90-metre-long, 4,000-tonne Stemat Spirit cable-laying vessel delicately negotiated their way around the old breakwater at Archirondel Tower.

The final few metres of the 27km cable slipped of the Stemat to a gentle ripple of applause from deck hands and onshore observers that included Environment Minister Steve Luce and his Assistant Minister Steve Pallett and other States department officials.

The cable, though lying on the bed of the bay, is clearly marked by 126 buoys and will be re-floated later in the week for the beach landing operation and ‘pull in’ to Jersey Electricity’s Archirondel Termination Station during low tides on Sunday and Monday afternoon.

RTE in France have completed the beach works in Surville and are now jointing the subsea section of N1 to a 2km new landline that runs to St Remy des Landes Substation where it will connect to the French grid.

During a tour of the Stemat after the cable landing Sean Ventress, Deputy Offshore Construction Manager told Jersey Electricity CEO Chris Ambler that Jersey was ‘the most picturesque place he had every dropped a cable’.

He also remarked on how good the custom-built N1 cable must be having taken 45 minutes to cut in the carousel compared with the usual 10 minutes of previous cables he had cut for offload. This is due to the double armoury of stainless steel wires that protect the power cores and embedded fibre optics cables.

After making ready, the Stemat departed overnight for Rotterdam with the remaining 3km of spare cable that will be offloaded and taken into the VBMS storage facility storage in Dordrecht where other spare lengths of the Channel Islands Electricity Grid subsea cables are kept in case of repair.