In this paper, boundary control of a marine installation system is developed to position the subsea payload to the desired set-point and suppress the cable's vibration. Using Hamilton's principle, the flexible cable coupled with vessel and payload dynamics is described as a distributed parameter system with one partial differential equation (PDE) and two ordinary differential equations (ODES). Adaptive boundary control is proposed at the top and bottom boundaries of the cable, based on Lyapunov's direct method. Considering the system parametric uncertainty, the boundary control schemes developed achieve uniform boundedness of the steady state error between the boundary payload and the desired position. The control performance of the closed-loop system is guaranteed by suitably choosing the design parameters. Simulations are provided to illustrate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed control. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.