Winter has properly arrived and with it a shift into top gear for our dredging fleet with some serious amounts of mud to move…
Our larger dredge set up, including backhoe dredger ‘Doreen Dorward’, and our 300m3 capacity self-propelled, split hopper barges ‘Nab’ and ‘Needles’, have recently completed dredging at Haslar Marina in Gosport for Boatfolk Marinas. The dredge rig then relocated over to Newhaven, and are now carrying out a number of dredging operations at Cowes on the Isle of Wight.
Our busy dredging program is expected to keep us working hard all winter at a various yacht clubs, marinas and private residents in Cowes, including for Cowes Harbour Commissioners where a dredge of 5,000m3 is required at their marina. The dredge team will be working a variety of shifts, including tidal shifts over 24hrs/day, 7 days per week, to get the jobs completed as efficiently as possible to help minimise the disruption to our clients.
Following this Doreen Dorward and our hopper barges are headed to Portsmouth Offshore Group for a 10,000m3 dredge at their marina in Gosport, before moving onwards to regular clients in the Solent area for the rest of the winter period. They will then return to Newhaven for a dredge project in the spring.
Our large 50t long reach excavator is equipped with a 3D RTK GPS linked dredging control system which facilitates highly accurate dredging to achieve a good quality finish and minimise over dredge. We work closely with hydrographic surveyors, and we can organise interim and post dredge surveys on request, and arrange quantity calculations.
More locally, our smaller dredger C H Horn has been busy completing dredging for various local clients including the local Harbour commission, and is currently busy on a 9,000m3 dredge for a large marina in Poole Harbour. CH Horn will then be relocating to a local residential marina which will keep the team busy through a large portion of the winter before moving on to other local yacht club marinas to keep on top of their maintenance dredging needs.
C H Horn is an extremely efficient and manoeuvrable self contained dredger, able to load her 125m3 capacity hopper well in as little as one hour with good digging, and then sail to the nominated sea disposal site to safely discharge the dredged spoil. Ideal for smaller marinas!
If you have a requirement for marine operations in shallow or near shore projects, please feel free to get in touch to see where we can help.
We can co-ordinate producing dredge design drawings and then get these converted into the required file types for uploading into our dredge control systems. We will also provide statutory notifications on behalf of clients to comply with Marine Management organisation marine licence conditions.