Gdansk Shiprepair Yard REMONTOWA (Poland) has signed a contract with Tidewater Marine for the supply of two small Anchor Handling Towing Supply (AHTS) vessels in 2005, with an option for two more vessels. The yard developed an innovative design in response to Tidewater’s invitation for bids for vessels capable of 80, 100 and 120 T bollard pull while operating in shallow waters with draught of 4.6 m. Important design objectives were simple construction and low operating costs. In order to minimize the vessel’s operating costs the yard focused on improving speed, deadweight and cargo capacity based its design on the initially assumed size of the propulsion plant.

The new hull was designed and tested in cooperation with the Gdansk Design and Scientific Research Centre. It was found suitable for various OSV type vessels offering the benefits of increased load and speed. The simplicity of the hull’s shape offers savings at the prefabrication stage. Greater load capacity and the ability to increase the number of trips in a given time thanks to increased speed at the comparable fuel consumption has been seen as an important outcome of the design process. An additional benefit for the ship operator is the flexibility of the vessel, as it can operate both in shallow waters and in deep sea.

The vessel is classed by ABS. It has two 2,983 kW main engines driving contra rotating CPPs in nozzles and two 1200 kW shaft generators. In addition, two FiFi pumps 800kW each are driven from the front end of each main engine. Electrically driven 800HP bow thruster is integrated in compliance with the DPS -1 class notation.