After a one-month long journey on board COSCO Shipping’s heavy lift vessel Xin Guang Hua, Damen’s two floating dry docks have arrived in Curaçao, a Dutch Caribbean island.

Xin Guang Hua had to wait out for the heavy winds and currents on April 28 to pass before being hauled into harbor early Sunday morning by KTK tugboat Manta.

The locals in Willemstad, the capital of Curaçao, gathered to welcome the arrival of the floating docks, which are part of Damen’s USD 40 million worth investment in the yard’s infrastructure and equipment. The yard is located on the route to the Panama Canal and features two graven docks and almost 2 kilometers of quayside.

It was taken over by Damen in February 2017 and has been renamed Damen Shiprepair Curaçao (DSCu).

The 255-meter semi-submersible sailed 5,000 miles to transport the 120-meter floating dry dock, accommodated inside the 230-meter Panama dock.

The two drydocks are aimed at bolstering the ship repair capacity at Damen’s Curaçao-based yard. They are expected to become operational in August, this year.

The Rolls Royce together with world's biggest tug operator Svitzer A/S launched the first ever comercial remotely operated vessel on June 20, 2017 in Copengagen. 

Development of drones' technologies as well as IoT slowly but surely leads to implementation of new logistic services into most spheres of our activity. This time the shipping industry which is traditionaly very conservative becoming a pioneer

in implementation of new way of interaction along with major IT companies.

Marius Johansen, VP Business Solutions & Marketing, WSS Ships Agency explains, “Whether it is deliveries of critical documents or vital medical supplies, tank inspections, or monitoring cargo and stockpile levels, we believe semi-autonomous drone flights can support and further enhance what our ships agency team can offer our customers”.

Adding, “Relied upon by owners, operators, vessels and crew to get spare parts, medicine, documents, or cash to master where it needs to be at moment’s notice, drone delivery is a natural extension of our existing agency service portfolio”.

Dispensing with the need for launch boats to deliver such essentials to vessels at anchorage, along with cutting delivery times, Johansen estimates drone flights will also slash costs. With launch vessels typically costing on average 1500USD, he suggests a drone delivery would eventually come down to costing just 150USD.

Launching a large scale working pilot project in one of the world’s busiest ports in 2017, in spite of the complexity of global aviation rules and restrictions placed on unmanned aerial vehicles, for WSS drone delivery is very much here to stay.

According to The Guardian, UAE will be run out of ground water in the next 15 years  The major source of the fresh water in the area is mostly desalination, and average daily consumtion rate isabout 500 liters of water a day per person. A private company form Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, claims the National Advisor Bureau plans to send a vessel to Antarctida to haul the iceberg nearly ~13 000 kilometers to Fujairah.

Сompany claims the iceberg can provide enough water for one million people for five years. Moreover, there is a large influx of tourists to the Fujairah region to observe this unusual event.

The idea of towing icebergs is not at all new, this procedure has been used for quite some time by the offshore fleet to prevent the collision of icebergs with drilling platforms in the Arctic regions of Canada.