Hello. Today we're going to talk about a conversion of a 250 foot
concept design for a global expedition yacht. This would be a full-displacement.
Probably a 10 to 14 knot hull that is equipped for long-range maximum
endurance , say 30 to 60 days. And in terms of range - it's got to be
anywhere from four to eight thousand miles so you can get across an ocean and still have fuel.
This is Grant Maughm's design. I really like it. He's calling it the Raven. So, this is about a 240
foot hull here with probably a 10 foot extension on the back, so we're calling this a 250.
The 240 foot class of OSV and PSV is very popular and there are a number of these hulls available
that are different age different price points and different configurations. We''re going to actually
go aboard a couple of these. In almost all cases you're going to have a touch and go helipad
and you can talk about having a hanger this vessel is big enough to have its own
hanger . It has a big opening here for the tender garage. It has another opening here
that probably goes into a spa or an area for boarding and access. And then you've also got
the Euro transom. This is an important door here and you should pay attention
to this because if you've got guests on board or the owner on board and you have to load in
your stores, spare parts, all the things that you need to keep the boat going;
this door here will go right into an area that will lead to the walk-in refrigerators,
the reefers, your pantries and will also have access into the engine room. It has a nice big
bridge that will not all be business. There is space up there for the owners and guests and
you'll see on the conversion vessels that we're going to look at, the commercial ships that more
than likely they're going to have a bridge that's further forward, because that's the way that those
boats are built. In this instance, we're going to bring the bridge back. We'll keep the deckhouse,
but we'll probably bring the existing bridge back on the hull. This area of the vessel that looks
like the the back end of an empty pickup truck is actually full of equipment and weight and this is
ideal for building out for an expedition yacht. In this particular layout here, it
looks like they have a hot tub in there and that's probably also a screening room because you've got
lay down pads and what looks like a screen. Now on some commercial boats this actually is
the helipad up here and I don't see any reason why you couldn't do that if you wanted to have
a different configuration on the stern. This creates some protection from sun and weather
for an observation deck here for guests and owners to sit up on the bow. One thing I like about this
and that I don't like on some other boats, is that you've got the the whole crew up here and
it's nice to have a little bit of privacy up on the bow, entertaining or hanging out, and not have
the crew there lurking. But that's a matter of taste I guess. For some people that have
large needs for toys- and they're talking about SUVs and ATVs and submarines and
motorcycles and all kinds of stuff that they want to bring; having a big beam, full displacement
boat really does have a lot of advantages. So I have a lot of footage of the boats that
I visited down in Louisiana the last time I was down there. But I actually didn't have the right
footage for these 240's and so I decided to jump on a flight and go back down to Louisiana. It was
a little toasty. I landed at midnight and it was 88 degrees and it only got warmer during the day.
But it was well worthwhile and now I'm going to show you a little bit of what i found down there.
Today I'm inside of what is probably the largest shed that i've ever seen in Fourchon, Louisiana,
about to go aboard this vessel behind me here - a 240 foot OSV. I'm going to be taking my cameras
aboard three of these 240 foot OSVs which are just tremendous workhorses for in the offshore oil
fleet. This one is a 1998 hull. It was built in Louisiana - C CARRIER. It has a 54-foot
beam and the defining feature of these OSV's is the expansive open aft deck which can be about
180 feet of open deck by 54 foot on the beam and not only is it a lot of space but it has a huge
amount of load carrying capability. This hull is almost 25 years old and these rugged steel hulls
hold up extremely well and you won't see much difference in this hull when compared
with a hull on a vessel that's maybe eight or ten years old. We managed to get aboard just
before a passing thunderstorm doused the decks and actually helped cool things off a little bit.
We're fortunate to be able to get aboard this vessel as the crew was just finishing
up preparations and setting off for the Gulf of Mexico. The bridges are fairly vast compared to
yacht standards. You also immediately notice that you have a 360 degree vantage point. All these
vessels are equipped with very robust DP2 systems along with all of the class required redundancies.
Walking aft to starboard you have your tank management and all the
pump systems and then the alarms and the fire systems.
And despite everything being digital these days, you would still have
on all these vessels full sets of manuals. On the aft of the bridge is the command station
for all of the operations when out off the rig with the redundant DP2 system and
full control of the vessel and tremendous view of the workspace from this aft side of the bridge
There's a nice big nav station here which has all of the normal digital input and
data points coming in that you would expect and then a really nice traditional sized
chart table here with all of the chart drawers for the printed charts
and you can see that they are using these in addition to all of the GPS and the digital
readouts. I wanted to make note here that although these are us-built CAT engine vessels, you'll see
all Ulstein equipment here and Rolls-Royce. Those suppliers are in Norway and on top of that, the
interiors that we're going to inspect now are also fabricated in Norway as well. For an expedition
yacht conversion' these facilities are turnkey and ready to go to sea. With temperatures in the 90s,
where I wanted to be was here in the cold stores, and even better in the large walk-in freezer
compartment which was chock-full for the trip. Here's a typical cabin. It's actually a spare
cabin because they're using it for storage right now but this gives you an idea. The engine room is
vast with at least two decks of height and equipment on all two
decks, plus there's a mezzanine level there. You have Caterpillar mains and Caterpillar generators.
There's a full inventory of spares on board and of course workshops. Power management is in the
engineering space which is up high affording a view of the entire engine room space.
I just wanted to jump back out of the tour for a moment here and look at a general arrangement
of a typical OSV. This is not the vessel that we're on right now, but it's a typical layout.
In this case, the engine room is all the way aft, which is ideal because it isolates your
noise vibration and exhaust away from the general living quarters. So realize that on the bridge and
the crew accommodations that we've been looking at- we're basically looking at the front 15 or 20
percent of the hull. That whole world is there in the conversion, ready to go. So, what we're
going to walk through right now - i just wanted to point out, this is probably about a hundred feet
of the interior space in the hull where you've got your dry bulk tanks and your liquid mud tanks and
this is all available to be re-purposed. You can extend the crew areas in here. You can put in crew
gyms. You can put in the cinema. You've got all kinds of storage. You can have walk-in reefers.
Back here is typically, on an expedition yacht, is going to be part of your garage
and your water toys and so that's the space here . And when i'm talking with clients something that
they don't realize if they're used to 160 foot or 180 foot yacht hulls where they're trying very
hard to find space to put things- they don't realize the incredible open spaces that exist
here that we can re-purpose and that is one of the huge advantages of these offshore supply vessels.
So let's go back on board and check it out. Here are your wire runs out in the open, of course and
these are the liquid mud tanks. They are taking up a space that is probably more than two decks
height-wise and you'll see as we walk along here the pumping station
at the center of the hull here and these are all the liquid mud pumps and piping. All that's going
to come out and it's going to become usable space for our expedition yacht purposes. A glimpse at
the independent Ulstein Rolls-Royce Z-drives which function as part of the DP2 system of the vessel.
So here we are on board the 240 foot HOS Sweet Water. This was built in 2009 at British Aerospace
shipyards in Jacksonville Florida, which at that time was called Atlantic Marine. so it's U.S.
built to ABS specs. We've got probably at least 150' of deck, because each deck strap is 10 foot.
We're going to turn this inspection over to Darren Pitre, who has deep experience with these vessels,
operating them at sea and maintaining them ashore. This vessel has got more space now. There is a
larger pantry space a lot larger galley. This is more like it. All stainless steel. It's got,
we call them reach-in cooler freezer. Then you have your walk-in. You could load this freezer
from the back door. That's a watertight door. That's a very good feature.
Again you have your chain locker and then this one's a lot larger,
you have a lot more storage in here. You're running two bow thruster engines. These are
C 32 Caterpillars. They're close to a thousand horsepower- somewhere in that thousand range.
On the forward one, it's the same thrust as the other vessel. It's a Bronnvill.
The forward one has an angle drive. then it has the two hpu units for each bow thruster
hydraulics because it's a hydraulic pitch wheel on the thrusters, which is sweet. Over to the port
side is your hpu for your cranes and your anchor windlass. You got your three transformers 480
to 208. Now we're walking aft on the starboard side of the hull, past mud tanks on the center
line. Huge mud tanks and and on the outside wall are corrugated tanks of water and fuel.
Here we are at the engine room, all the way aft and everything's run neatly up in the overhead.
It's out of the way. It's just so much bigger. It's a deeper hull is what it ends up being it
makes it so much more room. How many feet to that deck? I think that's some 18 foot hulls. All your
fuel manifold tier-two engine. You can tell it's a tier two engine on this side where you have
your two pipes going to your after cooler. Then when you're going go to the tier three engine,
your after cooler is going to be even higher. These vessels run a raw water cooled gearbox
which is really easy to work on. Probably when you're running the CP wheels is where your fuel
efficiency is going to come in versus a fixed wheel. This is your switchboard. This is the B
bus. This is the A bus. That's C18 Caterpillar engines pushing 340 kw each and split rudder
system. One electric motor with two pumps and you can run the whole ship on one motor. Here we
opened up one of the covers looking into the lower bilge. We're actually looking upside down here.
I just wanted to see how clean and well maintained this ship is . It's like new everywhere you look.
CP gearbox- it's a scanner system variable pitch. This is your leverage arm that
changes your pitch. You have a mechanical pump and an electric pump and as you can tell this vessel's
a lot newer than the last vessel because of the nicer woodwork,
the nicer walls. You have another room here with two-man stateroom. To your right is your captain's
day-room. And then you have your engine monitoring, your fire alarm system, your fire
pump panel ,steering failure panel and you have your Brunvoll, the controls up here for your pitch
for your thrusters and then on the right side is all your engine controls with scanner, your radar.
This is part of your GPS, your autopilot, rand adar screens on each side.
Our work is more at the stern station. Yeah, that's where you're making money. Correct.
They hang out on the stern station which you could probably tell by the chair. The
stern chair usually will wear out. The Chelsea clocks - they're all shiny. How are they so shiny?
Because they cleaned them before they got stacked and they cleaned it. They came out all right.
As mentioned at the outset of the video, the task at hand with the conversion
is to retain the valuable assets of this hull and the systems that are already on board,
reposition the deck house and the bridge to a more practical
and more aesthetically pleasing position and to end up with a wonderful global expedition yacht.