DutchWorkboats ethos

Bruno Tideman, DutchWorkboats, said to Maritime Journal: “Seawork was an excellent venue for us, we took many people out on the boat and it generated a lot of interest.”

In all, DutchWorkboats secured 30 new prospects from the show this year and from those it has sent out five quotes based on expressions of interest for the Fast Tender 8.5m.

He puts this down to the quality of the vessel and the fact it looked good in the water, but also for another reason.

Mr Tideman explained to MJ that up until now the tendency large scale for commercial operators has been to only have one smaller fast boat onboard which needs to be on standby for search and rescue. But the problem is that they are often used as workboats too. “This is obviously not sensible, because if there is a search and rescue situation while the fast vessel is is at work, then there is a problem. Operators are wising up to this,” he said.

It’s a ready market and one that DutchWorkboats intends to cash in on. The company was founded to design and build workboats of up to 15m, custom built for specific deployments.

Although the boatbuilder is well versed in building in aluminium, it has its eye on the next big thing – HDPE (High Density Poly Ethylene). Mr Tideman says that the advantages of HDPE are high shock absorption, high buoyancy, greater felibility (but without losingrobustness) and zero corrosion.

“This is where we see the future,” explained Mr Tideman. “HDPE is durable and it’s sustainable. It can be recycled, re-used and re-built over again.”

The company is on build number three since starting out in June 2012. The newest vessel nearing completion is an aluminium survey vessel of 7.50m with three person cabin and inboard diesel for an international dredging company. The vessel will have surveying and planing speeds of up to 25 km/h and a trailerable maximum speed of 40 km/h.