Superstructures Added as Mistral Heads for Completion

MWB – Motorenwerke Bremerhaven – began the ¢22m refit of the 95m long and 15.6m wide ship in January.

By the time the vessel is re-delivered, she will be little short of a complete newbuilding, according to yard officials.

The complex conversion, for French concerns Compagnie Generale de Geophysique and Louis Dreyfus Armateurs, is the biggest ever tackled by MWB.

The yard has built a solid reputation in recent years as Germany’s leading specialist for repair, conversion and engine work on smaller seismic and other research ships, mainly for Russia and Scandinavia.

That experience clearly counted last year when MWB was selected from 30 competing shipyards in Singapore, Poland, the UK, the US, Norway and Germany to tackle the work on Mistral, whose job is to locate and investigate seabed fossil fuel deposits.

The brief was to completely rebuild and modernise her from the main deck up. Four new decks are being added to accommodate 1,100 tons of measurement equipment, along with a helicopter landing pad and a new bridge deck. All in all more than a thousand tons of new steel are going into the ship.

Mistral is also being widened by nearly four metres on both sides and fitted with two additional, complete engines, gearing and propeller unit in the space gained to transform the single-screw vessel into a triple-screw workhorse. The additional 5,600kW is needed to handle the precision towing of 10 satellitemonitored measurement cables, 60 kms long, at 5 knots and with a bollard pull of 80 tons.

MJ Information No: 16934