It takes a great deal of skill, experience and even some bravery to move huge cargoes across the Seven Seas – anything from super yachts to over-sized buoys. A closer look into the transport engineering department of a leading heavy lift shipping line shows some of the hard work that goes on behind the scenes and below the decks to move some of the largest cargoes on the seas.
To everybody but the experts the operation of such movement can seem impossible. In one recent operation, the German shipping line Beluga Shipping’s vessel MV Beluga Singapore moored in Mombasa to discharge Likoni and Kwale, two German-built ferries, each capable of carrying 1,500 passengers.
The ship’s on-board cranes worked in tandem to lift the cargo alongside the vessel into Kenyan waters. Under normal circumstances for the experienced crane drivers this would be nothing more than a routine operation. Especially as they already managed to lift these ferries in a wide turn right on board of the multi-purpose heavy-lift freighter a few weeks before in Hamburg. In shipping projects, however, things are hardly ever normal and exceptions are the rule.
In Mombasa a warehouse limited the working radius of both cranes severely. Not one degree too much, not a single second too long was the margin for the Beluga Singapore to heel during the lift. Otherwise the several hundred tonne ferries, each spanning 63m in length, could have swayed uncontrollably into the building while hanging on the cranes of the multi-purpose heavy-lifting project carrier.
Beluga Headquarters
“Anything one can get on board, somehow one can get off again,” says Yahaya Sanusi, Engineering Manager at Beluga Shipping. In other words, what goes up must come down: if it was loaded, however difficult the maneuver, it can be unloaded
With his team of 40 engineers, shipbuilders, nautical experts and captains, Sanusi works on the fourth floor of Beluga’s corporate headquarters in Bremen, Germany. Beluga’s engineering division is about the largest of its kind in European shipping. Half a dozen other colleagues run operations from centers around the world, in China, Japan or the United States.
Computer Aided Design
Computers with at least two screens and sometimes additional laptops, pocket-calculators and software like CAD (Computer Aided Design) as well as simulations programs like ANSYS are their tools. They handle complex geometry like other people survey their shopping lists. Some equations they ask their hardware to solve frequently keep these high-performance computers busy for an entire day and night.
It is the abundance of challenges in project shipping which has transformed Sanusi and his colleagues from a mere group of professionals into a team of experts: although some projects are planned years in advance, it is the team member’s combined flexibility and ability to perform under pressure that gets jobs done as often operations do not go as planned.
“In the morning we often simply have no idea what the expectations of the day will be,” says project engineer Anika Kerkow. Urgent requests from the chartering division may be followed by an equally pressing demand of a cargo superintendent (CSI), who faces major changes at site and by phone asks for support to be able to improvise immediately.
In heavy lifting the CSI – also known as supercargo - is the outpost of the transport engineering on location. He is the bridge between land and vessel by supporting the Master to manage the transition from the theoretical loading plans as calculated by planners and engineers into practical details of lifting, maneuvering and securing the huge cargoes under real conditions on onboard.
Yet the most complicated cargo to transport has not managed to make Sanusi lose his poise: on the contrary he says: “I am disappointed if a shipment is not challenging.”
The Singapore-born Sanusi embodies solid knowledge coupled with a lot of experience and a fair amount of talent, a mixture which seems to have resulted in something like a sixth sense for shipping solutions. He silently sports the success of some heavy transports which even his own colleagues and competitors considered to be impossible.
Satellite Pictures
In Mombasa, the job was executed with precision from the first to the last centimeter. “This was an extremely tight fit,” says Sven Kohlen, Transport Engineer. During the months prior to the loading, Kohlen and his colleagues had practiced the situation many times. With the help of several stability calculations and computer simulations they puzzled out the perfect combination of movement, trimming of the ship and fastening of the ferries to the cranes.
Kohlen had flown to Mombasa for this difficult operation. Travelling around the globe is part of the routine for a transport engineer as well as for supercargoes. Satellite pictures and photos of the location might offer an impression of what is feasible or not, yet nothing can substitute the scrutiny of an expert. And in this business there is no room for anything but expertise.
James Graham - I have been a professional journalist since the 1980s. I started on weekly newspapers in the English Midlands - working intially on one of ...
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