History

JD-Contractor A/S was founded in 1972 by Gert Norman Andersen as a Commercial Diving Company. In the beginning JD-Contractor was the local diving contractor performing all types of underwater activities, ranging from harbour maintenance, cleaning out ship propellers, to assisting salvage companies with rescue and salvage work.

It did not take very long, however, before the company got involved in the business segments that form the base platform of our expertise today. Our involvement in Subsea Cables and Pipelines started out already in the 70’ties, with inspection and repairs of communication cables for the local communications companies. In the early 80’ ties, we developed our first in house burial systems, which again allowed JD-Contractor to take on larger scale subcontracts, in relation to installation and burial of both power and communication cables.

In 2001, JD-Contractor took over the NKT-Cables Marine Installation Department. That enabled us to go to a new level, in relation to cable installation. We could now offer full contracts for both burial and installation of subsea cables both at home and abroad. Hence, over the years we have installed numerous cable systems either directly for the cable owners or as a subcontractor to one of the large cable manufacturers. Especially the installation of very large cables has become a “House speciality” for us. We have several times over, broken our own records when it comes to installing the World’s largest subsea cables.

As we had already dealt with electrical power transmission cables, it came as a natural next step to be among the pioneers within the offshore wind industry. JD-Contractor was contracted to install the cables for the very first Danish offshore wind farm built at Tunø Knob in 1995. Through the years, we have been involved on every Danish offshore wind farm project as well as several in Sweden, Germany, Ireland and United Kingdom. Horns Rev, Rødsand, Baltic One and Borkum Riffgrund to name but a few.  

Another unique area that goes back to the early days and which is still very much a part of the Company activities is the Marine Archaeology segment. Over the years, we have been involved in numerous very exciting projects. In the 80’ ties and 90’ ties, we salvaged a great many artefacts from the HMS Sct. George of the cost of Jutland. In 2007 and return in 2008 our vessel C/V Cable One was the escort ship for the journey across the North Sea of The Sea Stallion from Clendalough, a reconstruction of an ocean-going Viking longboat found in Roskilde Fjord. In 1996, we discovered the “Aggersund ship” an intact wreck from approximately 1100 AC. On several occasions, we have been in the North Sea to search and salvage artefacts from the battle of Jutland, the World’s biggest naval battle. Among those artefacts a submarine conning tower from an English WW1 submarine. We continue to be very active on Marine Archaeology and have a long history with working for the Danish Viking Museum, in 2012 we endeavoured on the largest marine archaeology project to date. For several months, we were diving on two ships from the 1600th century in the Fehmarn belt salvaging numerous canons and other artefacts.