Holger Dilling News

The 2016 Polar Code has its first luxury-adventure cruise adherents for the long, new ice-free seasons in the high latitudes. Likewise, many designs winning over owners and explorers target exotic Asia-Pacific destinations. Competition is fierce among “designer-shipyards” seeking to build their designs, but their creations could face fewer hurdles to construction than the designs of independents without a yard. Concepts bound for the slipway have something else in common: new davits for large numbers of water craft.

Central Asia is a booming oil region not far from the Persian Gulf. Energy companies ply the big lake to rack up staggering barrel counts at elephantine oilfields with names like Tengiz (Kazakhstan) or Kashagan (Azerbaijan). Painstaking, oil-fueled nation-building is underway across an oil province, where very shallow water hinders plant and equipment moves by platform supply vessels. Until now — new module-carrying vessels, or MCVs will float high-capital cargoes through Russia’s river system and across the Caspian shallows to Chevron’s Tengiz Extension project.

In September, 2016, an U.S. shipyard and the Canadian design business of an Italian-owned Norwegian shipyard won the largest vessel procurement contract in U.S. Coast Guard history. Now, Eastern Shipbuilding will build nine — and possibly many more — Vard Marine designs in its Panama City, Fla., shipyard. Early impressions are of a unique vessel not so unlike comparable European designs by Vard Holdings or parent company Fincantieri. An oceangoing hull of clean, classic — some would say Canadian — lines are the platform for an electronics and weapons payload designed…