Thanks a bundle

dunes only 10 miles north of John O'Groats. Now, as Bill Mowat reports,

it is going on to even greater things.

SCOTLAND'S smallest, least-known, and oddest-shaped oil-fabrication

yard is also its busiest . . .

A record-breaking three-part #25m export order is due to sail out of

the Rockwater facility in the Far North of Scotland on time for

Norwegian waters within the next six weeks.

And Willie Watt, the 33-year-old construction superintendent at the

yard at Wester, just 10 miles south of John O'Groats, has revealed that

a new multi-million-pound order for the UK sector of the North Sea is

''in the bag'' while another tender, this time for offshore Denmark, is

''live'' just now.

The young executive, who is a native of nearby Wick, in Caithness,

exclusively revealed to Scotland's Business that talks with major oil

companies over two further potential orders are actively being pursued,

while there is another where ''preliminary design and feasibility

parameters'' are being examined with a possible oil company client.

And while Scotland's major oil-platform yards are struggling for work

to fill even 20% of their capacity, the switch away from ''big rigs'' to

the more cost-efficient ''sub-sea'' development of the remaining smaller

oil and gas fields in the North Sea and adjacent waters should favour

the little hi-tech yard.

Willie, whose background is in quality-control engineering, expects

the American-owned facility to continue to be ''very busy'' until 1997

at least.

The Wester yard nestles behind the sand dunes of Sinclair's Bay close

to the mouth of the sluggish-flowing Wester Water, which is still a

magnet for sea-trout anglers. It was founded on a ''one-off'' temporary

basis in 1979 to construct shore-built ''in-field'' pipelines to allow

early production to flow from Conoco's Murchison Field.

But its designer, 49-year-old former Dundee millwright Malcolm

McKelvie who is now Rockwater's ''concept study manager', realised the

enormous potential of shore-assembling ''flow-line bundles'', its sole

product.

''Flow-line bundles'' usually have several smaller-diameter pipelines

rigidly fixed inside an outer steel-casing and are fabricated on site in

lengths up to 6 km (3.75 miles), before being towed in a

computer-controlled midwater configuration to their destination oil or

gas field.

By the early 1980s Wester, which was then owned by Dundee's Kestrel

Marine, became the world's first permanent ''flow-line bundles'' yard.

Since then more than 1,000,000 man-hours have been worked there, by

specialist welders with very high ''codings'', who earn well above the

industry going rate. Many have been trained at nearby Dounreay, which

has supplied Rockwater with a steady stream of men qualified to advanced

''nuclear'' standards.

And more than #5m has been spent during the past five years in

modernising and upgrading facilities at the yard.

It is now a key part of the portfolio of Aberdeen-based undersea

engineering specialists Rockwater, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the

Halliburton Group from Houston, Texas, which also includes Brown and

Root, the owners of the Highlands Fabricators yard at Nigg, on the

Cromarty Firth.

To the layman the most noticeable part of the upgrading is the

replacement by Morrison Construction of the fixed A9 road bridge over

the Wester Water, which was constraining the yard's potential, with a

new hydraulically-operated #1.3m bascule bridge which will be ready for

traffic next month.

The flowlines at Europe's most northerly offshore field will be

installed from one of Rockwater's offshore-support vessels by remote

control, entirely without the use of divers, representing an industry

''first''.

And crude oil will flow through the two longest from a well-head

manifold on the sea-bed directly to two offshore loading-buoys, from

where shuttle tankers will sail their cargoes to refineries and

terminals throughout Europe.

It is a concept that BP is known to be eyeing carefully for the

fast-track plans to develop its two big Atlantic oilfields off the West

of Shetland.

Willie Watt says major productivity gains have been made at his yard,

and a total of only 80 men have worked there on one major project.

Between another 150 and 200 men have been working on sub-contracts at

the HiFab yard at Nigg, and at two engineering companies in Caithness

and another in Easter Ross.

But despite its technical innovations Rockwater is probably still

best-known as the company which put its executives -- including Willie

Watt -- through sheer hell on a Channel 4 televised ''survival course''

based at round-the-world yachtsman's John Ridgway's Adventure Centre in

the wilds of West Sutherland. The programme is having a coast-to-coast

screening in America this month.