Arkhangelsk Trawl Fleet (ATF) has entered into contract with Vyborg Shipyard for the construction of a series of fishing trawlers. The shipbuilding contract, signed at the the International Forum "The Fishing Fleet - New Impulse to Development" in Murmansk in March 2016, entered into force in November 2016.
For ATF, Vyborg Shipyard, a group member of United Shipbuilding Corporation (USC), will build four "turnkey" medium-size trawlers project ST 116 XL to be operated in the North Basin. Each vessel of the new generation will have on board a fillet factory, a fish meal plant, equipment for fish oil production, a can factory and will be equipped with cargo cranes with high capacity as well as a cargo trawl complex of the latest generation. It will be the first in the North Basin vessel equipped with automatic palletizing system in the hold that will reduce the time for unloading of fish catches. The planned catch capacity of each trawler is up to 150 t of fish per day. The trawlers will be reinforced to Ice3 class that will allow effective fishery time to be increased.
According to the shipyard, an important factor for development of these projects is a bill passed in the summer of 2016 on a mechanism of State support in the form of allocation of investment quotas for construction of the fishing vessels.
Vyborg Shipyard general director Alexander Solovyev said, As a result of effective cooperative work of representatives of USC, VSY and ATF in the near future Vyborg Shipyard will start work on construction of a new series of vessels. At the present the main activity of the shipyard is construction of ice-class vessels and icebreakers which are very sophisticated and outfitted with equipment. Construction of fishing trawlers outfitted with cutting-edge equipment will provide workload of VSY production capacities for the period 2018 - 2020. In Russia there are only a few shipyards capable to build fishing vessels including Vyborg Shipyard.”
ATF general director Alexey Zaplatin said, “We would like to thank Vyborg Shipyard for the fruitful work on finalization and approval of all main provisions of the contract. We can see that VSY has all the competencies and technologies necessary for successful implementation of this project. It is common knowledge that construction of fishing vessels at Russian shipyards has been made possible largely due to allocation of so-called ‘invest quotas’. Unfortunately, the statutory documents governing the conditions and volumes of invest quotas allocation for new vessels built at Russian shipyards have not been adopted yet. However, we strongly believe that the regulatory background will be set up by the end of this year and volumes of invest quotas allocated for our vessels will be sufficient for their profitable operation.”