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You’d think 132 ft. (40.2 m.) is enough but, it’s never enough .

We’d like to create a little bit extra space for our dive tender.  We were looking at 7.5 m. Humber Inflatables (2.8 m. wide offshore model) and 2 extra feet of boat deck would be nice. We’ve now decided to go for a custom aluminium tender design (see post (…soon).   It would also give two extra feet of tip clearance if we have to land with a helicopter.   That’s about a 25% more than we have now although since we wrote this post, we decided (September 2009) to create an extractable helipad.

Click on the image to see it bigger and let us know what you think.

It’s been some time since  I wrote about this topic but we finally figured it out, partly due to experiences during our last crossing and conversations with people in the field. 

The initial plan was to use (heavy) aluminum tenders which required a heavy crane and we didn’t really find a satisfactory solution on where to place it.  Now that we decided to use RIB’s as tenders we can use a lighter crane which means lower price and a crane foundation that can be a little lighter too.  That in turn means new options on where to place the crane. 

We decided to widen the top wheelhouse deck at the location of the life rafts.  The widening means not only more space to fit in a crane.  It also gives us a drier deck below and makes launching the life rafts easier.   

The crane we plan to buy is an MCA-approved model from Canadian manufacturer Steelhead Marine.  Their cranes are well designed, look good, they have a great website and their response time and quality of feedback exceeded our expectations.