Seafood to wind farms for Tidal Transit

Adam Wright set up Norfolk Fishing Trips in 2005 and has run it successfully as a day charter fishing business to date, running trips out of Brancaster Staithe in the summer and Lowestoft in the winter. Adam’s father is a fisherman so the sea is in the blood. He spent 10 years as head chef at two of the finest local restaurants on the North Norfolk Coast. With Norfolk Fishing Trips, he combined his love of the sea with his catering skills and offers clients memorable days out.

The Katie Louise (named after his wife) was built by Gemini Workboats in 2006. Losing days when conditions were too rough for would be clients, he started researching the developing offshore wind farm support market in his area. This led to a fortuitous meeting with Peter and Leo Hambro.

In January of this year the business and its assets were incorporated into Tidal Transit Limited (TTL), a Norfolk registered company. In February, the company raised in excess of £2m in equity financing from Peter Hambro Limited and Leo Hambro joined as commercial director while Adam is now operations director.

On 1 March 2011, TTL confirmed its order with Mercurio Plastics Shipyard of Cartagena in Spain and paid the deposits for two new state of the art, 20m crew transfer vessels that can not only carry 12 passengers in comfort (along with up to 10 tons of cargo) but also provide them with comfortable beds for the night at up to 150 miles offshore due to MCA Cat 1 coding and huge fuel tanks.

The designs for the new boats came through many negotiations with Martin Antrobus, owner of Work Boat Sales and UK Agent for Mercurio and the Mercurio team in Cartagena. The first boat, to be named Ginny Louise, should be in UK waters in October 2011 with the second, Eden Rose, following close behind in January 2012.

One of the strict conditions of the deal between Adam and his new investor was that he should have the naming rights to the first three new boats. He has three daughters and as the existing boat is named after his wife, the first three newbuilds will be named after his daughters. His third daughter, and Leo’s two, should not be too worried that TTL has ‘only’ ordered two boats thus far as the company has rights to a further 10 builds from Mercurio, which TTL hopes to be able to take up over the next three years.

Katie Louise has been liveried with Tidal Transit logos and has demonstrated the versatility of the Gemini Workboats design by recently taking on survey charter duties out of Grimsby, working with Subacoustech on Centrica’s Lincs offshore wind farm project.

Mercurio Plastics Shipyard was founded in 1997 in Spain and has subsequently built dozens of vessels in composites up to 35 m length. Its building procedure uses the latest techniques in composite manufacturing, such as vacuum infusion process, gel coaters and putty dispenser machines. Mercurio specialises in the design and build of composites workboats for applications including wind farm service vessels, crewboats, ferries, Ro-Ro, rescue boats, tenders, supply vessels, pilot boats, fishing boats, oil spill response boats, landing craft, research vessels, diving support, and workboats for the aquaculture industry.

Tidal Transit Limited will be sharing a stand with Mercurio at Seawork 2011.