The purpose of this monograph is to show how a compliant offshore structure in an ocean environment can be modeled in two and three di- mensions. The monograph is divided into five parts. Chapter 1 provides the engineering motivation for this work, that is, offshore structures. These are very complex structures used for a variety of applications. It is possible to use beam models to initially study their dynamics. Chapter 2 is a review of variational methods, and thus includes the topics: princi- ple of virtual work, D'Alembert's principle, Lagrange's equation, Hamil- ton's principle, and the...