Posted on March 5, 2025
Atlantic Towage & Marine‘s newest vessel, Ocean Shoalbuster, departed the Indian Ocean last month and continues its long delivery voyage to its Irish owners, having set off from South Africa this morning, writes Jehan Ashmore.
Ocean Shoalbuster, as the new name of the second-hand acquired 30-ton bollard pull (bp) tug suggests, is a Damen Shipyards vessel built to their ‘Shoalbuster’ 2609 design. Previously, the 215 gross ton tug named the MSC Nikki for Scottish owners had served a career particularly in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), from where on 26 January it sailed from Free Port, Abu Dhabi, on the Persian Gulf.
It arrived at Port Victoria, Seychelles, Indian Ocean, on the 6th of February, from where Afloat tracked the ‘Shoalbuster’ tug to remain in port for just over a week, until resuming its next delivery voyage leg to Cape Town, South Africa. At sea for almost a fortnight, it arrived at the port city’s Duncan Dock on Thursday for bunkers and loading provisions during the stopover, which lasted until this morning as the Ocean Shoalbuster heads further into the South Atlantic.
Ocean Shoalbuster is to serve the North Atlantic-based Atlantic Towage & Marine Ltd based on Bere Island off Castletownbere with its fleet of 14 vessels. Among them, as Afloat reported, is the newbuild Ocean Transfer, a multi-role crew transfer vessel (CTV) which is on a charter in the Baltic Sea.
As for the Ocean Sholabuster, its speed of 11.2 knots is derived from twin Caterpillar C32 engines and delivers a draft of only 2.6 m. This offers high maneuverability and is ideally suited to a variety of marine operations in shallow and deep waters.
MSC Nikki was built in 2004. Its principal dimensions are 26.21 m overall (LOA) x 9.1 m x 2.6 m (2.6 ft). Its classification society is that of Bureau Veritas (3/3 HULL MCA Category); it flies the UK (Red Ensign) merchant flag, also known as the ‘Red Duster’.
Accommodation is of heated and air-conditioned living spaces of a galley/mess and consists of single-crew cabins and one double-crew cabin and sanitary facilities.
MSC Nikki was sold by Maritime Craft Services (Clyde) Ltd of North Ayrshire, which was the Scottish company’s first newbuild Damen. It was also their first vessel to work in the UAE, where it arrived 20 years ago to work on the large and high-profile projects. This led to the project of The World, an archipelago of more than 300 artificial islands in the shape of a map of the world, and the second project involved the creation of a palm-shaped island called Palm Jebel Ali.
Since then, MSC Nikki has worked on further projects in the UAE and throughout the Middle East region in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the Maldives and India.
Asides MSC Nikki, Maritime Craft Services also last month disposed of two other vessels, the CTV’s MCS Boreas and MCS Blue Norther. The pair predominantly had worked on offshore wind projects in the UK, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Denmark.
In addition, MCS placed an order for three ultra-high ultra-high-performing small waterplane area twin-hull (SWATH) vessels to be built by Työvene in Finland and designed by ADHOC designs. They will be delivered in July, October, and July, with the final of the trio scheduled for early 2026.
