My Days and Nights at Sea with Two GENMA Cranes

My name is Wjia, and I’m a service engineer at GENMA.

In 2024, after two GENMA offshore cranes were delivered to the customer, I went onboard with them. One is a 1,600-ton crane, the other a 450-ton crane. Wherever they go, I go. This onboard service is one of the after-sales support options GENMA provides based on customer needs.

Over the past two years, I’ve followed these two cranes from one offshore wind farm to another in Chinese waters, and now we’re at the CZ2 wind farm off Hainan. Together, we’ve completed the installation of more than 100 offshore wind turbines.

Offshore operations mean high salt spray and humidity. Condensation builds up inside equipment, electrical terminals oxidize, and sensor connections loosen, often causing intermittent faults that are hard to reproduce. Add typhoons, short maintenance windows, and long lead times for spare parts and personnel to board, and the difficulty and risk are far higher than on land.

One night, during a lifting operation, a high oil-temperature alarm went off in the pump station. We safely lowered the hook first, then started troubleshooting. Such an alarm could come from the sensor, the wiring harness, the actual oil temperature, or the relay circuit. I gathered the vessel’s technical crew and the crane supervisor to investigate together, explaining my troubleshooting logic as we went. First, we checked the oil level—normal. Then we swapped the oil-temperature sensor and confirmed it wasn’t a false alarm; the oil temperature was genuinely high. Next, I used a piece of paper to check airflow through the radiator and found the outside was heavily clogged with dust, which was affecting cooling. After cleaning it, we tested again and the crane was back to normal. In the end, it was just a dirty radiator that needed cleaning, but an alarm in the middle of the night offshore still had to be dealt with immediately.

We often use real cases like this for on-site training with the customer. The crane has hundreds of limit switches and sensors, and no signal can be ignored. Even when readings look normal, we check them point by point during operational breaks, helping the owner fully understand the equipment and feeding field issues back to GENMA for design improvements.

Fortunately, our cranes are equipped with the GENMA CMS system, which collects real-time data from the entire crane. It supports fault storage, waveform playback, and alarm tracing. Many offshore faults are intermittent, so retrieving historical curves helps pinpoint the issue without blind troubleshooting. The system also includes overload and limit safety interlocks and supports predictive maintenance, greatly reducing unplanned downtime.

The hardest part of offshore service? When a fault occurs, spare parts can’t be delivered from land immediately. But lifting operations can’t stop, so it really tests our ability to solve problems on the spot.

If the fault directly affects lifting, and conditions allow, we may remove a part from a non-critical area as a temporary substitute. For major components, we assess the situation with all parties and adopt temporary measures such as reduced-speed operation to keep the job going.

Once, a boom angle sensor failed and the boom couldn’t lift. We removed a spare inclination sensor, connected it to the PLC, and enabled jog operations in manual mode to complete bolt torque tightening first. The sensor was replaced thoroughly after the operation stopped. It wasn’t a sophisticated solution, but offshore, if it keeps the equipment running, it’s a good solution.

Fortunately, GENMA has set up service warehouses in countries including India, Egypt, Mexico, Kenya, Morocco, Indonesia, Colombia, and Guinea. With common spare parts stored locally, emergency dispatch is much more manageable than before.

Actually, as a GENMA service engineer, my job is simple: stay with these two cranes, keep them running well, and make sure the customer’s lifting operations are never delayed.

I’m Wjia, a GENMA after-sales engineer. To learn more about our stories offshore, follow GENMA.