Ultra heavy-duty pontoons for wind farm facility at Lowestoft

Walcon Marine has installed a maximum heavy-duty berthing facility at ABP’s Hamilton Dock at Lowestoft, on the UK’s east coast. The facility has been designed and built to withstand the rough and tumble of the round-the-clock, fast turnaround activities of crew transfer vessels servicing the offshore wind farm East Anglia ONE, currently under construction in the North Sea. The specification also required the pontoons to withstand once in a thousand-year tides.

The facility is designed to accommodate up to four wind farm crew transfer vessels / fast crew suppliers, which are typically catamaran designs around 30 metres in length. It consists of four pontoons each 29 metres long, with two running along the quay wall as walkways while the other two come out at ninety degrees as finger pontoons. All are built to the same specification using Walcon’s commercial-grade Docking Solutions product. The tubular steel floats are 1350mm in diameter and manufactured using 10mm thickness steel. Heavy duty bollards are welded directly on to the structure.

The freeboard is also substantial to meet the needs of the high-sided crew transfer vessels, at 1400mm, and the pontoons are fully-serviced with single and three-phase electricity plus water and fuel. The decking is heavy-duty fibre glass.

The Walcon facility is part of a £10 million development underway at Hamilton Dock by Scottish Power Renewables, the operator of East Anglia ONE, and ABP to develop a state-of-the-art operations and maintenance base for the £2.5bn offshore wind farm. This will include a maintenance building, offices and warehousing as well as berthing. Walcon has been working with main contractor McLaughlin & Harvey.