Annual report 2019

48

SPECTACULAR DRY DOCKING OPERATION MAKES GLOBAL HEADLINES

The Boskalis heavy transport vessel BOKA Vanguard made global headlines in the summer of 2019 by serving as a floating dry dock for the Carnival Vista, a gigantic cruise vessel. “We had never loaded an Imax theatre, restaurants, shops, swimming pools, slides, a golf course and a crew of 250 people in one single movement,” Jilles van de Peppel said. Van de Peppel was a project engineer on the team that completed the preparations for the operation in just three weeks. The unique operation generated a flood of public publicity across the world.

With 1,968 cabins and room for about 4,000 passengers, the Carnival Vista is one of the world’s largest cruise vessels. It is 324 meters long and it weighs 67,000 tons. The ship experienced problems in the propulsion system in early June so that it could only sail at half power. The company was forced to cancel a number of cruises to execute repair works but the only suitable dry dock in the Caribbean was not available. “Boskalis had already announced a few years before, that it could transport another cruise vessel, the Costa Concordia” Van de Peppel said. “That was one of the reasons Carnival approached us in mid-June to ask if the BOKA Vanguard could serve as a floating dry dock.”