Member Article

Rotherham marine specialists secure six figure African fleet deal

Rotherham-headquartered maritime safety equipment manufacturer, Martek Marine, has supplied alarms to US firm Tidewater’s fleet on the coast of Africa, in a significant six figure contract.

A BNWAS is an automatic system that sounds an alarm if the watch officer on a ship’s bridge falls asleep, becomes incapacitated or is absent for too long a time.

Martek’s Navgard was chosen because it is particularly easy to install and meets fully the requirements of the fleet’s classification society – an NGO that establishes and maintains technical standards for the construction and operation of ships and offshore structures through regular in-service inspections.

This was a vital consideration, as installing and ensuring compliance for BNWAS can become more expensive than the equipment itself. The company’s Navgard is the only system available which has type-approval from all major international classification societies, particularly important for fleets working with several different societies.

Navgard is designed for absolute simplicity during installation. For example, the screwed connections, which avoid the need for soldering; a market-first bridge motion sensor that is built into the device’s control panel; and single wire-type connections-that reduce time and cabling needed for installation.

Martek guarantees quicker and cheaper installation of Navgard, promising to refund the equipment if customers do not find this to be the case. It started the Tidewater installation project by training the fleet’s engineers while the first few vessels were in dry dock in Las Palmas.

They were quickly happy with the simplicity of the procedure, at which point Martek simply supplied the equipment for the engineers to install themselves – saving the customer thousands of pounds and leaving the vessels’ operations undisrupted.

Lyall Smith, Tidewater’s regional technical manager, said: “After some consideration, I chose Navgard for our African fleet of offshore support vessels because the system had no hidden costs – our own engineers fitted them, the installation did not interrupt our work at all, it already had type approval under ABS and all our flag states and Martek obtained blanket plan approval quickly and at very little cost.”

Navgard uses real-time data logging, providing essential evidence in the event of an incident. Unlike some competitors that use simple key switches, the Martek system requires a master password to disable, also noting when it is switched on and off so that checks can be made to ensure continuous use.

When MV Karin Schepers grounded in 2009, the accident report noted that a BNWAS was present but had been switched off by crew.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by David Gatehouse .