Ship Repair
NOAA ship Oscar Dyson underwent repair work at Bay Ship & Yacht
The second ferry contract was for the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District’s 180 ft MS San Francisco. Valued at $18 million, the refit project will see the 37-year-old vessel equipped with brand new machinery, electrical and auxiliary systems, a brand new interior and paint job. The upgraded ferry—which was recently stripped of its old components and sandblasted to bare hull—will be delivered to the Bay Area for service by the end of this year. The project, says the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District, is funded entirely by grant funds from the Federal Transit Administration and the State of California under the Public Transportation Modernization, Improvement and Service Enhance Account program.
Yard expansions to meet growing demand To accommodate its growing repair business, Marine Group Boat Works acquired and renovated its third shipyard facility. “The National City location,” says Roberts, “added an additional 250,000 square feet to the shipyards portfolio of haul-out locations and is the site of several commercial and government repair contracts.” Shipyards are also bolstering their repair capability by adding larger drydocks. Just last month, Hendry Corporation, Tampa, FL, christened its new drydock, the Capt. F. M. Hendry. Named after the company’s founder, the $3.5 Million, 2,500-ton drydock will enable the yard to expand its services to the larger vessels it couldn’t handle prior to the drydock’s arrival. Down in the Gulf Coast, Bollinger Shipyards, Lockport, LA, has maintained a steady 26 MARINE LOG May 2014
flow of repair work, including the conversion and repowering of six PSVs to DP2, thanksin-part to its investment in infrastructure. Over the last five years the shipbuilder has invested over $100 million across its eight repair facilities. Its largest improvement and expansion project is its Bollinger Fourchon North facility. According to Bollinger’s Robert Socha, the 50-acre site will feature multiple drydocks ranging from 2,000 to 10,500-ton lifting capacity; a fabrication shop; a machine shop; business center with year-round office space for vendors and customers; as well as permanent onsite housing for workers. Upon completion of the Fourchon North facility, the current Bollinger
Fourchon South yard will be used primarily as a Rig and Topside facility, focusing on project cargo, load out and logistics support at Port Fourchon. The addition of a new floating covered drydock, the HMB-1, has enabled California-based Bay Ship & Yacht (BSY) to take on a whole new market. BSY’s decision to add the drydock was in direct response to its customers’ need for a larger, higher capacity drydock that could handle quick turn around time—specifically those customers who wanted to avoid going outside the region. The covered drydock, the first of its kind, allows the yard to handle larger and heavier vessels while other vessels are simultaneously worked on via the yard’s 1,200 LT Synchrolift and DD-1 floating drydock, which is capable of lifting 2,200 LTs. The HMB-1 also comes with one hell of a back-story. BSY’s David Ashton explains that the drydock, designed to be fully submersible, was built during the height of the Cold War and was used to recover a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine. It covering enabled the contents it held within to be completely undetectable. The U.S. Navy later purchased it to construct and house its ultra secret ship, Sea Shadow, an undetectable radar-evading swath boat design. Upon acquiring it, BSY performed general maintenance to make it a commercially viable drydock. BSY has also invested in additional pier space, equipment, training and recruiting practices to meet its growing customer base needs. The yard is currently in the process of performing maintenance on a number of U.S. Coast Guard cutters, U.S. Army LCU’s and
Damen Shiprepair busy with offshore work After an acquisition spree in 2012 and 2013, Damen Shiprepair & Conversion is a global shipyard group. Damen now has repair yards in the Netherlands, Sweden, France, Dubai, as well as yards in South Africa and Singapore. Additionally, Damen hopes to leverage the expertise of the new yards in the offshore vessel market to build larger vessels for the offshore market. Repairs and large scale conversions for offshore operation vessels are currently strong at repair yards in Europe. In November 2013, Damen’s Shiprepair & Conversion facility in Rotterdam began work on a major refit of the Stanislav Yudin, a 24,800-tonne heavy crane vessel. In the space of just four and half months, the Rotterdam yard completed a complex refurbishment that included a complete
upgrade of the accommodation—designed for 151 persons—and the underlying machinery spaces. Ship repair and conver sion y ard Shipdock Amsterdam completed a sixweek propulsion upgrade of the 3D Seismic Vessel Polarcus Naila. It is now classified as a Special Purpose Ship. Damen Shiprepair Brest successfully completed a full technical survey and services on the largest sailing Ultra Large Crude Carrier Ti Europe. In Vlissingen, Damen Shiprepair converted the jack-up drill rig Shelf Explorer into an offshore hotel accommodation. The accommodation unit is now known as Atlantic Amsterdam. Damen says it expects to be granted a few more big projects to its yards in the not so distant future.