ITC sell the oceangoing tugs Suhaili and Simoon
Simoon was one of six ‘S – wind’ class deepsea tugs that were for many years the backbone of the ITS fleet.
International Transport Contractors (ITC), a member of the Tschudi Group, based in the Netherlands has sold two of their traditional ‘S-Wind’ class ocean going deepsea tugs.
The disposal is part of an ongoing fleet restructuring exercise under which ITC is successfully responding to changing market conditions.
On 24 March of this year the Suhaili was sold to the US based salvage and pollution response organisation the Resolve Marine Group. The tug was handed over in Freeport in the Bahamas, where it will be stationed and renamed Resolve Suhaili. The new owners are an OPA90 salvage and marine fire-fighting primary resource provider specialising in salvage, wreck removal and emergency towage. Resolve maintains salvage and emergency response vessels and equipment in 16 operations bases in the USA, Singapore, the UK, Mumbai and Shanghai.
In early April the sister tug Simoon was transferred to the Greek owners Fournarakis Bros and will be operated by Diavlos Pantanassa Inc under the name Panormitis.
Suhaili and Simoon were originally part of a series of six identical oceangoing tugs built for ITC in 1977 by Matsuura Tekko of Higashino in Japan. All six vessels were well equipped 55m long twin screw tugs of traditional design, fitted with Fuji 16 27-SX diesels generating a total of 8,440bhp to achieve a bollard pull of 102 tons and a free running speed of 13.5 knots.
Just two sister ships, Sirocco and Sumatras, remain effective members of the ITC fleet. At the time of writing Sirocco was engaged in a 30 day tow, delivering the redundant UK aircraft carrier Invincible to a shipbreaker in Turkey. Sumatras was underway with the barge AMT Challenger with a cargo of barge hulls onboard, on route from China to Rotterdam. A further member of the ‘S-Wind’ class, Solano, is now operating in the Arabian Gulf for another owner as the Karar but still under ITC management. The sixth member of the class, Shamal, was sold to Spanish owners Boluda in 1998 and is still in operation as the VB Artico. It gives ITC some satisfaction to know that all six tugs are still trading and remain a testament to their original design.
ITC is a company with forty years of experience that now owns and operates a diverse fleet of a dozen vessels. In 2005 a decision was made to diversify and operate offshore support vessels alongside its traditional core business of deepsea ocean towage and salvage. Since then a number of dedicated offshore anchorhandling tugs and anchorhandling supply vessels have been added to the fleet. That number also includes three Damen Shoalbusters that have proved their worth in the dredging and marine construction industries. The ‘B-wind’ class anchorhandling tug supply vessels with 12,000 bhp and 145 tons bollard pull, Blizzard, Boulder and Bluster, have proved to be particularly popular.
The company has always operated on a global basis. Experience in both, long distance ocean towage and offshore anchor handling and support enables ITC to operate its vessels mainly where those markets overlap.
In 2009 two brand new offshore vessels, ITC Chinook and ITC Cyclone, were chartered. Both have main engines of 10,880 bhp, bollard pulls of 133/136 tons, and are fitted with DP-2 dynamic positioning systems and fire fighting equipment to Fi Fi 1 standard, These latest additions, along with other members of the fleet, have since proven their versatility working in Far Eastern, African, Brazilian, Mediterranean and North Sea waters for blue chip clients.
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