Lifeboats in the desert

Well where else would you expect to find them?!

You come across the oddest things in the desert sometimes. Like these pair of matching lifeboats, absolutely miles from any coastline near Maleiha in the UAE.

As far as I can tell after a couple of minutes digging on the interweb, the massive Betatank II tanker was reburbished in Dubai Drydocks World in 2010-2011 and converted into the Firenze FPSO. It’s probably a fair assumption that these were replaced and someone bought them cheap, but then didn’t quite know what to do with them.

So here they lie, slowly becoming a desert landmark of the most bizarre kind!