Keel-Laying Ceremony at SANMAR Shipyard
The eight vessel of Sanmar’s 28.20m x 12.50m Terminal class ASD tugboats will be joining the fleet of Pakistan’s number two port, Port Muhammad Bin Qasim, located 35km east of Karachi. Commonly known as PQA and named after General Muhammad Bin Qasim, it is the country’s deepest port and currently caters for more than 40 per cent of the nation’s seaborne trade requirements. Sanmar will additionally be supplying a 20m long, 20 knot pilot boat, also to be built at the company’s yard near Istanbul.
Sanmar was declared the winning bidder for the construction and supply of both vessels following an international open tender competition. Delivery is expected to take place in March/April 2013.
The tug is from the Canadian design team of Robert Allan Limited and is of the highly successful RAstar 2800 Class and is very similar to Seaspan Raven, the first of four tugs delivered last year by Sanmar to the Port of Vancouver destined to reshape harbour towage and tanker escort operations in the environs of the largest port in Western North America.
The RAstar escort/offshore terminal tug designation is reserved by the world’s leading tug designer for a unique class of very high-performance ASD tugs, incorporating a sponsoned hull form, which has been proven in both model and full-scale testing to provide significantly enhanced escort towing and seakeeping performance. The escort forces are enhanced by the effects of the sponson as well as the foil-shaped escort skegs fitted. Roll motions and accelerations are less than half those of comparable sized ‘standard’ tug hulls. These tugs are intended for escort operations in weather and sea-exposed locations where a high standard of sea-keeping is required.
Port Qasim is accessible through a 45km long channel for vessels up to 11m draft and providing safe navigation for cargo vessels of up to 75000dwt. PQA in its quest for capacity enhancement has launched a multi-faceted strategy which also includes augmentation of its fleet of tugs and pilot boats. During the second week of September, authorities from Port Qasim visited Sanmar shipyard in Türkiye for the keel-laying ceremony of the American Bureau of Shipping classed tug which will be named Kadiro and be powered by a pair of Caterpillar 2,000kW type 3516C diesels driving Rolls-Royce model US 255FP Z-drives.
The twin screw pilot boat, which will be named Lahoot, will also have twin Caterpillar engines, each of 873bhp, and will have Bureau Veritas Classification.
