Taking a 'big fish' to water

GAVIN RILEY looks at the tricky manoeuvres and clever machines required to move a very new and very large boat from land to sea.

How do you move a 400-tonne motor launch out of the tight confines of the boatshed in which it has been built, and take it half kilometre to a slipway and into the water without so much as a scratch on its gleaming new paintwork?

One answer is you call in Tranzcarr Heavy Haulage of Auckland, which has the knowledge, skills, manpower and – most important – exactly the right equipment for such a tricky job.

It’s a job that can’t be done quickly. The monster launch, Bigfish, is 45 metres long, nine metres wide and 11 metres high. Working at a Mt Wellington boatyard, it took Tranzcarr and sister company Machinery Movers one and half days just to lift the launch from ground level to a height of about one metre and onto a transporter using two 400-tonne unified jacking plants placed either side of the craft.

This operation was managed by Don Mann, who heads the company’s heavy-installation jacking team. He was assisted by six staff and the lift was accomplished 50mm at a time.

“A lot of equipment was required, including specialised hardwood timber we import from north Queensland because New Zealand doesn’t produce timber hard enough to sustain that sort of weight under load,” Tranzcarr general manager Warwick Bell says.

Once the jacking was completed, Tranzcarr’s German-built Goldhofer THP/UT platform trailer was placed underneath the cradle in which the launch was sitting and the trailer’s hydraulics engaged to lift the cradle off its support.

The trailer was in a “three file” configuration – a one-and-a-half-wide trailer with rows of 12 wheels. It is believed to be the first time the configuration has been used in this country by a New Zealand company, though it was used here in the 1990s by an overseas company.

Warwick explains: “It’s what they call a split trailer. It’s a standard row-of-eight platform trailer which can split down the middle and have a row of four wheels tagged to the side of a row of eight, making a row of 12.

“We had to use that trailer because we were very confined for space. We had 16 axles, making 192 wheels on the trailer. A single trailer would have needed a lot more axles and we wouldn’t have had the room to do it. The stability of the load was paramount and therefore a single wide trailer would also have had difficulty with such a heavy load and high centre of gravity.”

The Goldhofer UT three-file’s capacity was 37.5 tonnes an axle, making an overall capacity for the 16 axles of 600 tonnes – easily able to handle Bigfish. But the transportation by Tranzcarr’s two Kenworth C500s (with a Scammell S24 as back-up) was still tricky as the launch had to be manoeuvred painstakingly out of the boatshed in a straight line before being turned because there were only millimetres to spare either side.

All the prime movers operate fully automatic Allison transmissions which made the constant manoeuvring of the load a lot easier.

After leaving the boatshed Bigfish was reversed about 500 metres onto the slipway where the trailer and its load were lowered onto support stools placed under the cradle, and the trailer was withdrawn. The Machinery Movers crew then jacked the launch down onto a winch-operated launching trolley, owned by the boatyard, and the trolley was floated into the water at high tide.

To load the boat onto the trailer and move it to the slipway took eight hours, and to jack it down occupied another six. This part of the operation, including assembling the trailer, was managed by Tranzcarr’s transport supervisor, Dave Tangarae.

Commenting on the overall project, Warwick Bell says: “It looks easy and the photos look spectacular, but the effort, planning and equipment that go into such a job are immense. It was a very difficult job and if we hadn’t had the Goldhofer UT trailer we couldn’t have done it.

“The manoeuvrability and capability of the new technology in the Goldhofer trailers meant it all went very smoothly, though it still required a large degree of skill and patience.”

Warwick says Tranzcarr gets involved in the offroad moving of large boats which are beyond the capability of other heavy-haulage companies.

“We’ve done a few of these, including small naval patrol boats at Whangarei, and had previously hauled the largest pleasure craft built in New Zealand, which weighed 580 tonnes. But it’s not everyday work.”