Come hull and high water

A measure of a good shipyard is the range of services it can offer and the range of works it can undertake, and there’s no doubt that Amsterdam Yacht Services has those elements covered thanks to its background as a commercially orientated shipyard. The measure of a great shipyard, however, is not just the scope of services it offers but how it handles and adapts to unexpected complications in projects. It is here that Amsterdam Yacht Services really shines, as a recent project for a demanding commercial client has proven.

The project began last November when a 24-metre commercial vessel arrived for an emergency haul-out after the crew spotted a leak in the hull aft. Although AYS has transitioned more toward yacht and superyacht works in the last decade, its heritage and experience in the commercial world, along with its inhouse engineering and metalwork capabilities, make it perfectly placed to handle such jobs. However, on closer inspection the problem was found to be much more deeply rooted.

“The leak was coming through the hull itself, not through a fitting, which was the interesting part as we don’t see that very often,” smiles Robert Binnekade, managing director at Amsterdam Yacht Services. “So we did our investigations and found that roughly 80 per cent of the aft hull area was pitted to less than 50 per cent of the original hull thickness. She had leaking exhausts in the back that hadn’t been maintained and the hull basically corroded through from the inside out.”

As the team investigated further they found more and more bad spots. For a lesser yard this would have presented a serious issue, but for Binnekade’s team it simply meant a reset of expected works as the team gathered to find solutions to the hull’s problems. “We contacted the customer and said it would mean a rebuild of the entire aft hull, a section roughly six metres long and 5.5 metres wide,” says Binnekade. “So that’s what we did, completely under Lloyd’s classification with welding protocols and fully certified materials. We replaced both hull plating and some of the longitudinal stiffeners that had corroded through.”

Adding to the complications was the fact that the aft ship contains all the technical elements such as rudder hydraulics, which all had to be removed, and then replaced once the framing and plating work was completed. Then a further problem was found – coolant was leaking from the internal cooling pipes, showing she had also corroded through those. “The repair itself was minor, but the whole path to get there was much more involved,” explains Binnekade. “Initially we thought we’d have to fully remove the engine but that was cost prohibitive, so the AYS team came up with a method to lift the engine in the engine room, and put it on supports with space underneath to effect the repair.”

With the project nearly finished – having taken considerably longer than client or yard first thought thanks to the additional problems uncovered – Binnekade says it’s a perfect illustration of AYS’s capabilities to undertake any type of work and to problem-solve on the fly. “It shows our capability to basically to a very custom repair job, and it shows we’re not a one-trick pony,” he enthuses. “We can do not just replacement of the plating, for example, but the whole job, from assessing the issues using our inhouse engineering expertise, to finding solutions to tricky problems and completing the project to the very highest standards demanded by classification societies for commercial ships. Whatever the job is, from maintenance and repair to refit and construction, Amsterdam Yacht Services has the facilities, the team and the know-how to do it, and to do it to the very highest quality.”