Shipping Lines - From the early onset of a northern winter

Industrial Ruby, a former Beluga heavy lift cargo ship.

When Lord Inchcape formally opened the Sea Oil marine support base at Ferryden in 1975, it wasn’t thought that half a century later the facility would be catering for a different type of offshore energy sector, writes John Aitken.

The initial foresight of the men of vision was that their pioneering project would play a leading role in providing a range of support services for a large and growing fleet of offshore support vessels plus a fleet of fast crew transfer craft.

As in the early days of the oil and gas exploration and development there was a strong Scandinavian presence within the shipping sector e.g. supply and survey vessels etc, when a fleet of brightly-coloured modern ships could be seen regularly lining the quays along the south bank of the South Esk.

The other day I came across a photograph from the past of the Edda Sprite, port of registry Haugesund, coming up the South Esk painted in her original livery of red hull and yellow upperworks. The present owners still keep the same colour scheme on the Brint Enabler, until recently the Edda Brint, an IRM vessel employed in the offshore wind generation industry. In Dundee in the 1970s I had the privilege of meeting the owner Johannes Ostensjo on board the Edda Sprite, which had a charter from BP working on the Forties Field

In 1975 the Montrose Review reported: “In 1972 they (P&O) had come to the conclusion that Montrose harbour was a good one weatherwise and a substantial new development should be welcome and feasible to the local population. The more they examined the proposal the more outstanding the claims of Montrose became.”

Over the decades since, the port has consolidated its importance on Scotland’s east coast, confirming its present and hopefully its future role, within the offshore renewables industry.

During the last week of October, a 10,538-ton deadweight, Liberian-registered, Dutch-built general purpose cargo ship Industrial Ruby berthed at the South Quay. Departing for Abidjan, she is also capable of handling heavy lifts by using her two deck cranes in tandem.

Previously named Beluga Recommendation, she was one of the 60-plus Beluga fleet of multi-purpose heavy lift cargo ships based in the historic Hanseatic north German port city of Bremen. The first of their vessels Beluga Favourisation, brought a part cargo of baled wood pulp to Montrose, followed by several renamed others. The company also experimented with wind power and their Beluga SkySails was reported to provide fuel savings of five per cent. A few years ago she too came to Montrose having been renamed.

After having had an albeit rather brief existence the company was declared insolvent in 2011 - quite a difference from the owners of the next cargo ship to arrive in the port. The Norwegian-owned, but Bridgetown-registered coaster Jumbo, belongs to one of the largest short sea fleets in Western Europe with over 130 ships. Constituent parts of the Wilson group have been in the shipping business for almost 100 years. Some ships of the Paal Wilson fleet have names ending in ‘o’ while the majority have the pre-fix ‘Wilson’.