With new fishing vessels being built for French owners in Boulogne and Lorient, the Padmos shipyard at Stellendam in Holland has a healthy orderbook, which includes a couple of new twin-rigger/fly-shooters for Dutch owners.
Padmos has just delivered the new Mercator to Sébastien and Guillaime Leprêtre in Boulogne and Marilou to APAK in Lorient, and sister vessels for both are due to be delivered in the spring.
‘We are very busy at the yard in Stellendam, and are working on two 25 metre trawler/fly-shooters for Dutch owners,’ commented Leon Padmos, speaking at Mercator’s christening.
‘One is the new UK-124, for the de Boer family who already operate the Tunis van Luut UK-224 and Wilhelmina UK-112. The other is for Klaas van den Berg and his son Klaas Jan, and is a replacement for the Hendrika Jacoba GY-127, and these two are more or less the same.’
UK-124 is expected to be complete in the early part of 2020, followed by GY-127 in the summer. These are 24.95 metre overall, 8.50 metre breadth vessels, and the main differences are in the deck equipment layout.
The new GY-127 replaces a 40-metre former beamer built in 1982 as GO-38, and which was initially converted to work as a twin-rigger before a subsequent refit added fly-shooting capacity.
‘We have never had so many newbuilds,’ Leon Padmos said.
‘But all the interest is in twin-rigging and fly-shooting. There is so much uncertainty around Brexit and the future of pulse fishing that nobody is talking about beam trawlers at the moment.’
