Screaton Undersea - Manufacturing Shoot

I’ve said a few times on these posts that I have a fascination with peeking behind the curtain. That sounds like a creepy photographer thing, I don’t mean it that way, I mean it from a business and life perspective, in the sense that there’s that many things that go on around you, that you have no idea were going on. The likes of building infrastructure or the roads and railway networks, where people won’t ever think how that’s built, or done. We just reap the rewards, as opposed to seeing any of the context behind the process. And this is another one.

So this was a visit to the Port of Blyth to see Screaton Engineering, who produced a one of a kind undersea plough, which worked out in the North Sea towards Norway, installing undersea cabling for the power industry. Offshore wind turbines are obviously increasing significantly at the moment - the likes of Dogger Bank and the new one up in the wilds of Scotland, are providing a significant chunk of power to the UK these days. And this cable, it holds part of the infrastructure.

As much as the North East is a hub for actually building the turbines themselves, with Wilton and other places around that are building the units, there’s also the infrastructure around it with undersea cabling, battery storage units and all that sort of stuff, which we never really see. We never really take any account of it, we just flick the switch, just turn the telly on and never really take that into account. So to spend a few hours in the presence of this enormous undersea plough, I still haven’t quite got my head round how deep it is at the moment in the black depths of the North Sea, ploughing cables through to provide us with that light switching on.

It’s just fascinating and long may it continue on projects that I do that just make me go, “Wow! That’s just an amazing bit of kit!” or an amazing process, that without being a photographer, without being asked to take pictures of it, I’d never have really even contemplated, I’d never really even thought about it.