Seawork exhibitor enjoys heavy footfall
One of the Clipper vessels is seen in Turks Boatyard for maintenance.
Considering that a fleet of ferries running up and down the Thames can take over 8,000 passengers a day, the large footfall, translated into six million actual feet, manages to put a strain on the decks.
Seawork gave exhibitor Marval Marine the opportunity to show the often hidden side of the company’s broad rolling repair schedule for the Thames Clippers, which takes on everything from paint and hull work to sign replacement.
“The company, said owner and manager Brad Payne, “aims to be a complete marine one-stop shop.”
It can turn around almost anything and everything repair related and is notable for going that extra mile. The company even recently added a specialist signage department so it could deal with these requirements in house.
Marval handles all the bodywork maintenance of the Thames Clipper ferries (as well as a number of others, including the Port of London Authority boats), from its base in the historic Turk's Boatyard at Chatham.
Mr Payne explained, “This three million per year footfall does mean footfall in a very literal sense and it manages to do enormous damage to the decking areas of the boats, taking off five layers of polyurethane paint, right down to the bare metal in some patches."
To give a comparison, a car tends to have 25 to 40 microns of paint, whereas the boats have between 400 to 500 microns on their decks. "Plus, you only have to have a resurgence in the fashion for stiletto heels and you can tell the difference”, added Mr Payne.
Another facet of the yearly maintenance round is the hull. Mr Payne explained "We use a
fairly hard self-polishing formula, but it is a balancing act. We have to get this right because the boats are travelling at 25 to 30 knots all day, every day." While this helps to erode the antifouling, it’s obvious that if the hull is left with a bare patch from being worn or abraded away and marine fouling gets a chance to take hold, "you have a big, really big rise in fuel costs".
Mr Payne explaied that that the larger Clippers can get through around 1,000 litres of fuel
each day, which, because these cats are designed to offer low resistance to the water, means that if they have hitchhikers in form of marine biogrowth, the efficiency goes down by a large proportion and the fuel consumption consequently can go up by as much as 25%.
Marval is also a goldmine of hard-to-get products. “We have found it ‘useful’ to lay in big stocks of the Dayglo Orange boards that the MCA has decided need to be on all boats using the tidal Thames, Mr Payne added. "Its things like this that can be difficult to get hold of, though you wouldn't believe it until you try.”
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