MIGHTY SHIPS — PEACE IN AFRICA

She is called “Peace in Africa” and she is as rare as the diamonds she hunts for on the bottom of the sea. She is a massive, a huge one. Her crew checks thousands tons of mud trying to find a few precious stones. It is a tough and dirty job – a constant battle against unforgiving sea, mechanical breakdowns, and deadlines – this is not a full list of difficulties faced by the crew members every day.

No other ship in the whole world can handle a job “Peace in Africa” does. Thirty kilometers off the coast of West Africa she is mining the ocean floor for diamonds. For millions of years streams of the rivers formed the famous African diamond fields. While regular on-land diamond hunting implies digging very deep, this ship working offshore applies a pioneer underwater mining technique – one hundred and twenty meters below the seafloor.

The vessel is owned by the world famous De Beers Company. Delivered some thirty-five years ago, and originally designed to be a cable layer, this vessel was subsequently converted to the type of ship she is today. She has a huge seabed crawler installed to undertake the dredging and connected by means of the large rubber hose for transferring the seabed material to the plant…