Brancaster: Glancing out from his new home in Brancaster in eastern England a little over two and half years ago, Leo Hambro stood, amazed at the whirring white field of turbines in front of him stretching out far into the North Sea. Already with a strong renewables background a chance encounter with Adam Wright around that time led to the formation of Tidal Transit, a firm that has been ferrying people feeding off the offshore wind boom in the region ever since.
Wright previously ran the 2006-established Norfolk Fishing Trips (NFT) with a single boat, Katie Louise, providing day charter fishing trips from Brancaster in the summer and nearby Lowestoft in the winter. In August 2010 he lost a lot of days due to bad weather so looked in to buying a bigger boat. In November 2010 Hambro and Wright joined forces.
"We both looked out of our windows to see the offshore wind boom off the Norfolk and Lincolshire coast and decided to focus our efforts for new vessels pre-dominantly on this sector,” Hambro recounts. The company was formed in January 2011 with the assets of NFT rolled in to it and then in February the new company raised £2.5m through equity funding to purchase two new purpose built wind farm service vessels, ordered them from Mercurio Plastics of Cartagena, Spain. The first, Ginny Louise, was delivered in December 2011. The second, Eden Rose, arrived in April 2012. The third, Tia Elizabeth will be in the UK in the next month.
“We chose Mercurio because of the proven and patented GRP hull design that dramatically improved the sea keeping of a typical catamaran workboat. We worked with them to design a vessel, purpose built for the offshore wind sector that would increase the access windows for commissioning and maintaining the turbines,” Hambro explains. Tidal Transit has options available for another seven similar vessels from the same yard.
Wright had been to sea since he was a child as his father was a fisherman. Hambro’s background was more about being on the edge of renewables having worked in the sugar industry pushing ethanol production, in the forest industry trying to improve yields by developing biomass fuels and then in a trading capacity to supply biomass to the European energy sector.
“This move into vessel owning and operating gave me another opportunity to keep my fingers in the green energy sector,” Hambro explains.
Offshore wind has been a “booming” sector, Hambro says, for the last five to 10 years in the UK and now that boom is catching on in German and Danish waters. “There have been delays for most projects but this is not surprising considering the investment required in these projects,” he adds.
This past week Tidal Transit has just celebrated the completion of 10,000 safe passenger transfers from its two personnel transfer vessels to wind turbines situated in the North Sea.
With the view out into the North Sea increasingly strewn with turbines and worldwide projections for wind power set to increase many times over year in the coming decade Hambro has expansion on his mind.
“We are continually looking at M&A opportunities as well as building or acquiring vessels from other operators or yards,” he tells Maritime CEO, concluding: “We see the offshore energy sector, whether it be wind, tidal, wave, oil or gas as a great opportunity in the coming years.” [18/06/13]
