With our editorial board member Bas Lenferink as coordinator, we can offer our readers/subscribers a content-rich dredging special this month. This is in the same month that an important dredging symposium takes place in Alblasserdam on Thursday, 20 March. Unfortunately, we were unable to publish this dredging special prior to the dredging symposium, but this issue certainly remains worth reading.
Once every few years, the Dutch/ Belgian dredging world commissions an investigation into their future prospects, which should result in a useful report providing food for thought for everyone in the dredging industry. André Kik of dredging organisation CEDA reports on this in this issue.
In addition, this dredging special features articles on coastline care, dredging shipbuilding specialist Royal IHC’s design for a hydrogen-powered hopper dredger, an emission-free inland waterway dredger by Paans Van Oord, Van Oord’s water injection dredger Rijn, which was completed last year, the Dredging Museum, and two articles supplied by CEDA. On behalf of SWZ|Maritime, we would like to thank everyone who contributed to the realisation of these articles.
Also read: SWZ|Maritime’s February 2025 issue: Golden Triangle returns, education needs to follow suit
Ship conversion in detail
What we as editors are also very happy about, and of course we hope readers are too, is a first ship description by Bruno Bouckaert. Better known in the shipbuilding world as the man of the Hull Vane, but for some time now active as an independent naval architect with his company Freeboard BV.
He describes the conversion of a small French split hopper dredger, once built at IHC Verschure in Amsterdam, into a full-fledged trailing suction hopper dredger that will bring and keep a number of Brazilian ports at depth. A story about what the Dutch are good at; coming up with solutions at competitive costs that can also be earned back. As for Bruno, we hope he will surprise us with more interesting ship descriptions in the future.
Also read: SWZ|Maritime’s January 2025 issue: Tideman special and optimistic 2025
The race towards the hybrid fleet
It should not go unmentioned that in this March issue, we also have the second installment of a triptych by our contributor Rui Costa on the developments around the hybrid fleet, drones for the surface of the sea or below. The Ukrainians have shown that they can inflict a lot of harm on the Russian navy with these. But other navies have also been coming up with autonomous or hybrid solutions for naval warfare for quite some time.
In short, in my opinion, this issue again offers numerous interesting articles that testify to a currently very dynamic Dutch maritime sector.
This is editor-in-chief Antoon Oosting’s editorial accompanying the March 2025 issue.
SWZ app and archive
Our digital archive is available to subscribers both online and in our new app (available for Android and Iphone) and they can read the digitial version of our March issue there. Not yet a subscriber? Visit our subscription page.
Also read: SWZ|Maritime’s December 2024 issue: Finland and the quest for clean fuels
The articles in SWZ|Maritime’s March issue
In addition to the regular sections such as Dutch news, Markets, Global news, book reviews, news from the KNVTS and Mars Report, the articles in the March issue are:
- The Dutch-Belgian dredging cluster
- Coastal safety through innovation and partnership
- Dredging on hydrogen
- Emission-free dredging with the Christiaan-P
- Conversion of the Cap Croisette
- Water injection dredger Rijn
- Preserving dredging history
- The race for the hybrid fleet
- CEDA – The cutter suction dredger of the future
- CEDA – Fuelling the future
Picture: On 8 March, Royal IHC launched the electric mining cutter suction dredger Sandra for Kenmare Resources. Read more on this customised vessel in our news item (photo Royal IHC, cover picture of SWZ|Maritime’s March 2025 issue).
Also read: SWZ|Maritime’s November 2024 issue: Digitalisation and offshore energy
