Hermann Helms is the latest in a series of boats from the German Sea Rescue Service (DGzRS) to call at the east German yard Tamsen Maritim in Rostock rather than at yards on the organisation’s home river, the Weser.
The 27.5m long and 6.53m wide boat is one of six similarly sized rescue cruisers which have served the German Sea Rescue Service since the first of them went into service in 1985. The others are Berlin, Alfried Krupp, Vormann Steffens, Arcona and Bremen.
The boat, based in Cuxhaven on the Elbe Estuary, sailed almost the entire length of the German Baltic coast to get to Tamsen Maritim yard at the eastern end of the German Baltic. This is despite a lot of routine work on DGzRS boats still being carried out at the organisation’s own headquarters shipyard in Bremen or at nearby yards there and in Bremerhaven.
DGzRS spokeswoman Antke Reemts told MJ that Tamsen, like the regular shipyards on the Weser, had “shown itself to be competent and competitive” and that was why it had won DGzRS work of late.
Hermann Helms underwent “a routine general overhaul which falls due on all our boats every two or three years and is designed to keep them in top condition”, she said.
The DGzRS’s biggest rescue cruiser, the 46m long Hermann Marwede earlier this year spent three months at Tamsen Maritim for extensive modernisation. The 44m class Wilhelm Kaisen was also converted there recently after being decommissioned and sold
abroad.
In Kiel, at the western end of the Baltic, the 72m long fisheries research ship Seefalke has completed overhaul and reclassification work at Lindenau Schiffswerft as that yard’s new owners, Privinvest, report good business despite shipbuilding decline.
The 12 m wide ship, owned by the German Government and operated by the Federal German Office for Agriculture and Food (BLE), was at the yard for a month.
The 1981 gt Seefalke is the latest in a string of prominent small specialist vessels which have kept the formerly insolvent shipyard busy since the start of the year. That’s when it was taken over by Privinvest and added to the group’s two other local repair and newbuilding facilities, Nobiskrug in Rendsburg and ADM Kiel, the former HDW Gaarden.
Together the three yards now make up a potent new German repair base which is increasingly attracting through traffic and voyage repair work on and around the Kiel Fiord and on the Kiel Canal, the world’s busiest manmade waterway, which is used by some 35,000 ships a year.
By Tom Todd
