Today i'm here at Tampa Ship we're going to take a look at a couple of Offshore Supply Vessels - one
in particular that is ice-class. It's probably unique in that it is a true Lloyd's ice class
and can cut through a meter of ice. The other one is 220 feet and we'll go all through that. We'll
do a technical tour. There are currently 400 people working in this shipyard here in Tampa
and we're going to have a ride around with Chuck Levert and see what's going on here today.
Here is the sea courageous that we're going to go aboard in a minute. It is stored here in
Tampa. Here are the basic specs. It's 220 feet long but it's got a 56 foot beam, so it's very
wide-bodied they regularly stretch these boats up to 280 feet by putting a plug in the aft deck.
You'll notice that on these boats that the deck houses are pretty much all the same,
regardless of the length. It is U.S.-built to ABS Classification. As you can see her,e
these boats are laid up in a secure area. They are put away with everything aboard, as if they were
going back into service. As I mentioned, the deck house - the superstructure on the bow of
the boat is pretty much the same on these vessels, regardless of the lengths. Let's say most of them
and most of the Chouest boats actually, if you compare them to a lot of the other Louisiana
supply boats, or international supply boats, the Chouest boats will have an extra deck level so
there's an extra mid-deck and that gives a lot of extra additional accommodations. So from from the
existing superstructure building aft and you can add directly after the existing superstructure
accommodations salon areas. Then after that, would be structure with a garage heli-pad on
top of the garage. And still with plenty of deck space for all your toys. Underneath you'll have
pressure tanks, bulk tanks amidship and then af, ,mud tanks. On the project that we're doing now
with Boris Kiriloff, the bulk tanks have all been removed, which leaves a wide open clean slate to
do with what you will and then the mud tanks aft are square - usually with a passageway you'll see
in a little, while either in the middle or on the sides; and those square tanks, oftentimes, you
just cut them open and then you can make storage rooms, work rooms , dive lockers and so forth.
See all of these these pipe structures, the racks on the side of the boat? They removed all of that,
cut down to the bulwarks. If you look on the side of, for example, the boat behind us, there you
see all the rub rail. They cut all that back and made the hull more fair. They went into the hull
of the boat and removed all of the bulk tanks that we talked about. If you look on the plans, those
are the round ones. They just cut those out and remove them and cut a hole in the deck somewhere,
pull it out and removed all the deck boards. On a Chouest boat, under these deck boards,
there's a layer of corrosion protection - really it's almost like tar and it protects the steel
below the wood from corrosion. And i can tell you on the Ryan, when we pulled up the deck boards and
removed the corrosion protection, the steel was like new. This is all high load-bearing deck
so the additional structure that we will do for the conversion is going to sit right on here and
it doesn't need any more steel work. It will sit right on here, right - and the additional weight
of the additional structure won't approach the limits of the vessel by any means not even close.
You know the rest of the hull structure on this boat originally protected before
paint was primed with zinc chromate. So that's something that most boatyards don't do. So now
we are walking forward on the main deck and we're going into a crew area - crew lounge
off to starboard and that opens up to the crew dining drinks area here is the full galley.
It's a commercial galley and there is a
series of walk-in cold stores here. Refrigeration in the first section here
and then behind these racks through the next door goes into the freezer walk-in freezer storage area
There are a couple of state rooms here with a couple of bunks, there
looks like there's maybe four in there.
So now we're going to go down a deck and forward into the bow section. So if you go forward,
there's going to be a thruster. You've got
a CAT engine here. We're all the way forward ,so this is the bow thruster
You can see the shaft here
and you see forward, it's a drop down thruster
Now we are heading off through the central passageway here
between the tanks headed towards the engine room
The majority of the pipes and the pumps that you see in this passageway will be removed when the
tanks are removed. Some of it's fuel transfer, if you need fuel transfer but the majority of
the equipment transfer pumps and so forth that you see you won't need. We're passing
through this watertight door into the cavernous engine room which also houses the generators
We're starting to get into machinery here right so you got generators
Everything's CAT. So three generators and your two mains and unlike on many yachts,
in the engine room you've got plenty of room here to work on the engines. There's probably
six feet above your head there. We're looking at two CAT 3516s, 3200 horsepower each
and three x 300 kilowatt gensets plus the emergency genset which is not right here.
We have a shaft running aft and in this case it goes up, because it connects to the
thrusters. Right on top of the thruster. So you'll have a shaft run going up
and then we'll get into the thruster room. So you can open one of those, that's just
basically a u-joint. The azipod thrusters are made by Rolls-Royce
and there is an aft steering control station here in case the bridge loses control . It's a backup
system with a compass. There was a time we were the largest CAT customer. We buy more CAT marine
diesels than anybody else in the world . This will be an accommodations deck.
With most conversion designs, this accommodation deck which would be one
deck up from the main deck as a crew quarters and the guest accommodations
are built going aft of this deck and that would also be one deck up. Now we're going a deck
higher where the captain has his quarters and the chief mate. This is an extra deck
On most supply boats, this is if you look at the design profile, on the top you'll see that the
bridge is the darkened windows there on the second deck up and this vessel you'll see
that that is where this extra accommodation deck is, and that the bridge is actually one
deck higher. And so now we're going to go up to the bridge deck and the wheelhouse
So when you're in operations, loading and unloading at the rig,
you're operating from this station and you have full clear view of the back deck.
So this is marine technology's dynamic positioning that's our company
paper charts, yeah i love it
These vessels have every necessary piece of electronic and navigation equipment and almost
all of the systems I would say have redundancy. They can certainly be upgraded and updated, but
they are ready to go to sea anywhere on the globe. There's a view of the bow from the bridge.
The entire starboard wall here is essentially operating manuals and ship manuals. So that
concludes our brief walk-through technical tour of a 220-foot OSV with 56 foot beam - this hull
can be extended to 240, 260 or 280 feet and many of them have been. So
please get in touch if you'd like more information and you'd like to discuss
doing a conversion of an OSV into a global expedition yacht.