TUGS & SALVAGE

Former Belgian tug sold for the fifth time

18 years ago

As more modern vessels enter service several of the deepsea tugs formerly employed by the Antwerp based towage and salvage company URS in the early days of North Sea oil exploration have been sold or scrapped, the most recent being Fighter and Boxer.

Brokers Marcon International has reported the recent sale of the former

Wrestler

one of the first of this large fleet of oceangoing tugs.

Wrestler

left the Belgian fleet in 1989 to start a long and colourful career that included operating on the east and west coasts of Canada and a brief spell in Asia.The Barbados flagged

Ocean Wrestler

(ex-‘Hadisangsuria’, ex-‘Ocean Wrestler’, ex-‘Wrestler’) has been sold five times in the 36 years since it was built by Beliard Murdoch of Ostend for URS (Union de Remorquage et Sauvetage) in 1972. Four of those transactions were brokered by Marcon.

On leaving URS the tug was sold to Pacific Towing Services of North Vancouver, British Columbia. Pacific Towing extensively refurbished the vessel and renamed it Ocean Wrestler. It will tow enclosed paper barges coastwise between British Columbia and California.

In the mid-1990s, this tug along with barges was sold on to South East Asia but saw minimal use and in June 1998 Marcon arranged its sale back into Canadian hands, this time to McKeil Marine Ltd of Hamilton, Ontario. While under McKeil’s ownership, Ocean Wrestler undertook a wide range of operations, as far apart as Greenland, Virginia USA and Chile. Pacific Link Ocean Services of New Westminster BC purchased the deep sea tug in 2000 and sailed it back through the Panama Canal to British Columbia. With Pacific Link the tug made numerous coastwise and trans Pacific tows between the west coasts of Canada and the USA , Russia and China.

And now in 2008 the vessel has changed hands once again to Sapola Tugs Shipping S.A., c/o Atlas Salvage & Towage S.A. of Piraeus in Greece, still retaining the name Ocean Wrestler. The tug still has its original EMD 12-645E5 turbocharged diesels producing 4,300bhp, controllable pitch propellers and Kort nozzles to give it a bollard pull of about 60 tons and maximum speed of about 14 knots.