Portugal’s Navalrocha shipyard has completed repair and refit of Polarcus Naila vessel.
The drydock project involved a broad package of work for the ultra-modern 14 streamer 3D/4D seismic vessel.
Navalrocha commercial director Sergio Rodrigues said: “The Polarcus Naila visited Navalrocha shipyard for a total of 33-days running through the Christmas period.
“The project involved five principal partners which operate at the Navalrocha shipyard base and a series of other specialist maritime firms, delivering a variety of mechanical, hydraulic, piping, steel work, blasting and painting as well as oil, fuel and ballast tank cleaning, carpentry and welding.
“Engineers repaired four winches, replaced a further two and installed two new winches to boost operations. A new partnership with Cyprus-based Deme Marine also saw the delivery of robotic hydro-blasting. This service helped reduce time and manpower while ensuring zero dust contamination or damage to seismic equipment, which can occur using more traditional slurry blasting techniques.
“A key reason Polarcus selected our yard was due to the scale of our graving docks. The vessel required draft clearance of 2.5m, dock floor to bottom of the vessel, to facilitate the main body of work involving the renewal of 12 box cooler units. The graving docks are also more suited to managing heavier vessels compared to floating docks. This is where Navalrocha offers a significant advantage to competitors and we are keen to open the door to many more projects involving seismic survey vessels and ships with similar dimensions such as OSVs, PSVs and AHT.”
Polarcus Naila superintendent Danilo Latkovic said: “This is our first engagement with Navalrocha shipyard. The project involved large volume of work with 140 small scale plus larger individual jobs. During the stay we had some unexpected large works which the yard managed well. Our decision to use Navalrocha shipyard was based on numerous factors including the accommodating our deep draft and block height demand. However, it was mostly driven by Navalrocha’s ability to fully focus its resources and facilities on our project. The scale of the yard means it does not manage multiple large projects at same time, which can be a shortfall in the case of larger yards. ”