Mighty Ships

The world’s most adventurous cruise ship fights through the ice-choked fjords of Greenland to visit a spectacular collection of wildlife and icebergs.

One of the world’s most advanced drill ships builds an oil well more than 2000 metres below the waterline in the Gulf of Mexico.

Northern Leader is Alaska’s biggest and toughest longliner. Catching fish with hooks, not nets, she sends out 80 kilometres of fishing line containing 76,000 hooks. In the heart of the Bering Sea, her crew battles a hurricane with 13 metre-high waves and winds of more than 110 kilometres per hour. All the while, this 56-metre ship keeps fishing – bringing home a massive catch of Pacific Cod – until one deckhand working is washed out by a powerful wave.

Almost three football fields long, the USNS Comfort is second in size only to U.S. Navy aircraft carriers. She is the largest hospital ship on the planet, with up to 1,200 crew, 12 operating rooms, 1,000 beds, and an impressive array of medical equipment. MIGHTY SHIPS joins the USNS Comfort midway through “Operation Continuing Promise” – a six-month mission to provide humanitarian aid to 11 countries in the Caribbean and Latin America. Sailing to the tiny Caribbean island of Dominica, Comfort’s crew sets out to aid 10,000 patients in just nine days.

A large storm hits the drilling rig out on the North Sea.

HDMS Peter Willemoes is a Royal Danish warship built for 21st century combat, equipped with sophisticated detection systems and powerful weapons. But before her crew can take her out to sea, they've got to prove they have what it takes to fight off enemy threats. Enter restricted waters and witness the series of intense battle simulation exercises her sailors must pass in order to join the multinational NATO Response Force. The stakes are high, but fortunately, they have one of the world's most advanced frigates on their side

She is built to haul more cargo faster, using less fuel than any other Laker. On this voyage she transports grain across the world's largest inland waterway.

This episode follows Happy Star during her second - challenging - voyage from Nansha, China, to Sept Isles, Canada and provides an insight into the ship and its crew.

Over seven seasons, Mighty Ships has featured 42 of the biggest, most technologically advanced on the planet. This special edition will feature the best of the best: from the world's largest cruise ships to the most powerful warships, from the strongest working ships to smaller, super-specialized vessels.

Other cable laying vessels require a second vessel to transport one end of their cables to shore. Stemat Spirit approaches the shore during high tide, then settles on the sand as the tide recedes. When the tide returns she floats up and sails out to sea, laying her cable as she goes.

Ibn Battuta is one of the strongest dredgers of her type. With a powerful spinning cutter head and a pair of heavy-duty cylinders called "spuds," She is capable of breaking up the hardest sub-sea soil. The spuds brace the ship in position while the cutter head's teeth grind away at the sea floor to deepen the Son Duong Port in Vietnam's poorest province.

The Avataq is a lifeline to Canada's near-Arctic communities, carrying everything from food and furniture to mining equipment and explosives to Quebec's inaccessible northern regions.

Purpose-built to install the world's most powerful wind turbines. Imagine a ship that can raise herself up 15 metres (5 storeys) out of the water to create a stable construction platform in the middle of the sea. Now add a 600-ton crane ready to reach high into the sky. That's Neptune: brand-new, ready and willing to install the world's heaviest and most powerful wind turbines on Belgium's first offshore wind farm.

She's an all-in-one mega fishing trawler and factory. Northern Eagle can catch and package fish at the same time. She creates more profit because she doesn't waste time (and fuel) bringing her catch back to shore to be processed. In fact, once she's out to sea, Northern Eagle doesn't return to port until her hold is full of 1500 tonnes of frozen, packaged product ready for market.

With 7.5 tons of steel salvaged from the wreckage of the Twin Towers forming her bow stem, USS New York is tribute to those who perished on September 11, 2001. From the images of the World Trade Center, to the banner listing the fallen, to the Broadway street sign donated by NYC's mayor, this ship is a powerful symbol. But she's more than that.

Consistently voted the world's top cruise ship by Condé Nast, Crystal Serenity is full of luxuries. She features contemporary suites, dining by the likes of Nobu, even penthouse suites with a full-service butler. And her guests keep coming back for more - half the passengers on any given sailing are repeat bookings. This cruise will take MIGHTY SHIPS into ports viewers have never seen before, including: the famous sites of Sydney harbour, the port of Melbourne, beautiful Bali and a large-scale furniture load in Semarang, Indonesia.

The U.S. Navy's newest ship, a guided missile destroyer, goes through testing with its crew in preparation for deployment.

Umiak I is the world's most powerful ice-breaking carrier, hauling mining equipment from Quebec City to Labrador and returning with nickel concentrate.

The FPSO Maersk Peregrino is the world's biggest oil production ship and is permanently hooked up at the Peregrino oil field.

Le Boreal is as sleek and nimble as a yacht, with the luxurious appointments and service of a cruise ship. She's also tough - custom-crafted to take on the furious weather and towering waves of the Southern Ocean

Research Icebreaker Canadian Coast Guard Ship Amundsen is a research icebreaker who job is to battle Arctic extremes to understand how gobal warming will radically change life in the high Arctic; the crew and scientists face extreme pressure on this dangerous mission.

USCGC Bertholf was built for U.S. Homeland Security to patrol the high seas, looking for drugs, weapons, human trafficking, piracy and traditional search-and-rescue missions; join her on patrol in the dangerous waters off Colombia.

Super Ferry Stena Britannica is a car carrier, passenger ferry, cargo transport and cruise ship all rolled into one; watch her as she enters active service on the busiest ferry route in the world, between Holland and England.

Saturation Dive Support Ship DSV Skandi Arctic is the biggest and newest saturation dive support ship, the mother ship for aquanauts working hundreds of metres below the surface in some of the world's most dangerous jobs; see her in action on a gas pipeline repair in the North Sea.

Solitaire is the only ship in the world capable of laying huge 30 inch diameter pipes on the ocean floor. Her crew of 420 work 24/7 and can lay down 9km of pipeline a day. Led by a vessel management team, the crew is made up of mariners and welders from all over the world.

The largest and most revolutionary cruise ship on Earth makes her maiden voyage.

An unprecedented look at nuclear-powered submarine USS Kentucky.

The Cristobal Colon dredges millions of cubic metres of sand from the seabed for a construction site in Germany.

A profile of the Queen Mary II, the most expensive ocean liner to set sail.

If there's a muscleman among ships, then its name is MV Fairplayer. A tour of the Jumbo Fairplayer, the biggest and strongest in a new class of heavy-lift mega ships.

HDMS Absalon, one of the most modern warships in the world, has set sail to stop modern-day pirates off the coast of Somalia.

She's the biggest, meanest, most lethal weapon in the arsenal of a global power. The USS Nimitz, like the whole US Navy, has to be ready for any mission, anywhere in the world. That's why she undergoes a rigorous - and often dangerous - evaluation before every deployment.

Tyco Resolute has one job: to keep the world wired. She installs and maintains the undersea cables that form the backbone of the Internet, and right now she needs to connect a nation in need of a 21st-century upgrade. Hop aboard as she lays fiber optic cables off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, a mission that's anything but simple. Malfunctioning cables and equipment, pounding surf, and low tides have put Tyco Resolute way behind schedule. If she doesn't pick up the pace, the entire mission will be in jeopardy.

The Paul R. Tregurtha is equipped to deal with the harsh weather conditions of North America's inland seas, but her first mission of the shipping season will push the vessel, and her crew, to their limits. Hop aboard the "Queen of the Lakes" as she attempts to deliver a much-needed 55,000-ton coal supply to a generating plant in Michigan. To get there, she must break through a barricade of ice and pass a shallow passage with just two feet of water beneath her keel. If the captain and crew aren't careful, they could find themselves stopped dead cold.

Climb aboad the CGCS Henry Larsen as she does an ice patrol around the sub-zero waters of the Notre Dame Bay area of Newfoundland and Labrodore. Built for the cold, she is capable of the year-round operations in the high Arctic.

With the ability to ferry 8,000 luxury cars, heavy trucks and tractors from one continent to another, the Faust is the biggest and the newest ocean faring vehicle carrier on the planet.

A tour of the Queen Mary II, the largest and most expensive ocean liner ever built, which has engines powerful enough to provide light for an entire city