Large ship sighted off Myrtle Beach coast on Sunday laying subsea infrastructure

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the amount of cable the ship is capable of laying.

MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. (WBTW) — Horry County’s development boom isn’t just happening on land.

A 467-foot French vessel was spotted moving across the Myrtle Beach coast early Sunday morning that ocean traffic data identified as the high-tech Rene Descartes. It was captured by a News13 Storm Tracker camera.

Built by Orange Marine in 2002, the Rene Descartes is a cable-laying ship able to stay at sea for up to two months while deploying 4,970 miles of uninterrupted product.

“As she is equipped with state-of-the-art technologies, she answers at best the highest market requirements,” Orange Marine says of the ship, which is outfitted with seven propellers.

According to global ship tracking site MarineTraffic.com, the Rene Descartes was moving at 4 1/2 knots after departing from Charleston.

Orange Marine’s fleet has traversed oceans all over the world laying subterranean infrastructure, including projects around Cuba, Indonesia, Japan, Madagascar and Singapore.

Specifics on the Descartes’ work was not immediately known, but Myrtle Beach is emerging as a hub for transcontinental data movement.

In October, DC BLOX opened a $31.5 million, 125,000-square-foot facility at the International Technology and Aerospace Park — a site that will host up to five subsea cables and colocation space for network and cable operators, communications providers, local enterprises, and partners.

Three of them are in use by Google and Meta, and connect to countries including Brazil, Portugal and Spain.

The company in May said work had been completed on a dark fiber network tying Myrtle Beach to Atlanta.

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