Important steps are following each other for everyone here at Ocean Builders to get closer to the first Pod to hit the water. Today, we want to check how the steel structure evolved since we submerged it a little more than a year ago.

It’s a heavy-lifting day for Ocean Builder as we are pulling out the Pods’ tripods out of the water. As you can imagine, it is both exciting and frightening because the goal is to learn about how the structure evolved in a year. Success or failure? Let’s see!

When we put the tripod in the water last year, it was definitely a significant milestone. The aim was to learn how the steel would react to being in sea water while being protected by a system of electrical anodes flushing current through the entire steel structure.

Today, we clocked another significant milestone as we will inspect the tripod to detect any rust, any corrosion that could have affected the steel’s integrity.
The spar tripod is very, very large so the lifting needed to be done with extreme caution. We are lucky to be working with very professional people. They know what they are doing in terms of heavy lifting, so now we will see if we did a good job ourselves in protecting the Pod’s floating structure from corrosion.

The first thing we noticed is the ecosystem born on every spar. “Control, we found life!”. There is indeed a lot of soft coral and algae that settled on the steel, attracted by the calcium carbonate.
To make sure that we could inspect the steel structure very carefully, we scrapped the algae and revealed the work we have created. What we created is very promising as the first inspection didn’t reveal any corrosion. On the contrary, it looks like we have created organic concrete around the steel itself.