The largest floating dry docks will be deployed in the Western Hemisphere at the Grand Bahama Shipyard.
The docks have a huge, combined total of around 1.2 million square metres of surface to be protected. This equates to the area of over 168 full size FIFA football pitches. The dry docks, ‘East End’ and ‘Lucayan’, with lifting capacities of 120,000 tons respectively, will expand the capacity at the yard in Freeport, Grand Bahama and will help to future-proof the repair yard in line with the growing sizes of planned cruise ships.
The largest of the two dry docks was built with an overall length of over 413 metres and a width of 85.11 metres. This provides significant capacity for the Grand Bahama Shipyard to conduct repair work to any cruise vessel in the global fleet. The floating docks are equipped with an automatic dock control system that enables automated floating and lowering operations. The two floating docks were constructed in China by CSSC Qingdao Beihai Shipbuilding Co., Ltd and are the largest of their type in the world.
Nippon Paint Marine, a marine coatings leader, has supplied its self-indicating epoxy coating NOA 60 HS for these floating dry docks/
NOA 60 HS is Nippon Paint Marine’s self-indicating epoxy coating, which provides long lasting anticorrosive protection in harsh marine environments. Crucially, NOA’s self-indicating technology assists sprayers, inspectors, the yard and owners to ensure that these heavy-duty coatings are applied to the correct thickness to ensure corrosion protection, especially on edges and corners where achieving the correct specified thickness is fundamental to long-term performance – essential on the huge areas that were needed to be coated.
