Sestao's La Naval shipyard yesterday launched vessel number 332 in its 93-year history. The ship in question is the Cristóbal Colón (Christopher Columbus to English speakers), the world's largest suction dredger, a 223-metre long floating factory weighing in at 78,000 tons and fitted with state-of-the-art seabed sweeping technology. It took the shipyard more than twelve months to build the vessel, with up to a thousand employees involved at peak moments, and it still has seven or eight additional months of work to put the finishing touches to the boat before delivery, scheduled for February or March 2009.
The Cristóbal Colón is La Naval's debut in a new shipping specialization, which comes after a period of producing gas vessels for transporting liquid natural gas. As the demand for bigger and bigger vessels increased, La Naval had to exit that particular market segment, as it simply didn't have the space to house them. So the shipyard plumped for the dredger market, a subtype at present in great demand all around the world.
Cristóbal Colón's owner is Belgian company Jan De Nul, which has the biggest fleet of dredgers anywhere in the world. To date, the business relationship that has grown up between the shipyard and its multinational client has led to two other orders, the Leiv Eriksson, identical in every way to its sister launched yesterday and scheduled for delivery in 2010, and mining vessel Julio Verne, which is to take part in a unique initiative involving mining for precious metals beneath the waters of the Western Pacific.
Never before has a dredger been launched with the kind of suction power of the Cristóbal Colón. Underwater pumps hang from its sides and, once submerged, begin to suck up stones and sands from the seabed pretty much like a Hoover. Capable of operating at a depth of 142 metres, the pumps are obviously just right for working in reasonably shallow waters on the open sea, as well as in ports and canals.
Jan De Nul will be using the vessel for dredging work for the archipelago of artificial islands currently being built off the coast of Dubai.