MOVING THE SUPERYACHTS

It takes skill, finesse, and the right equipment

Rybovich full service Superyacht marina in West Palm Beach Florida services vessels up to 328 feet...

Their facility, where they provide clients and crews with full service amenities during the time their boats are being worked on, is legendary. This famous client care is known as RYBOlife, and it’s only one of the reasons customers keep returning when their Superyacht needs service or outfitting.

Efficiency is another reason. Clients like the amenities, but are always eager to get back out on the water. To that end, the company contracted with Marine Inland Fabricators out of Panama City, FL to build them a yard tug to move and position the large vessels they work on efficiently and safely. The faster they can move boats around, the sooner the work can get done, and this latest tug is the sixth in their fleet.

Being specialists in large yachts, the folks at Rybovich often need to move them in extremely confined spaces in the two yards they operate. “In order to handle the size of boats that we routinely do we needed a tug with incredible horsepower, superior maneuverability, and an overall length of 30-feet,” commented Eric Bachewicz, Rybovich Marina Director and Captain of the new tug. A primary part of the tugs propulsion package requested by Eric was a WESMAR thruster. When asked why he chose WESMAR, he said; “Being in this industry, when I think ‘Bow Thruster,’ WESMAR is who I think of!”

The Builder

Marine Inland Fabricators, whose specialty is designing and building semi-custom and custom vessels for industrial marine work, built them a work horse vessel with power to spare both moving forward and side-to-side. Rudy Sistrunk, President of Marine Inland, said the steel hull 30-foot, 30-ton dry weight tug maintains twin 750 HP John Deere 6135 Power Tech engines. These drive a twin set of 57” 4-blade props for plenty of forward push and rotational control.

Lateral force is provided by WESMAR’s brawny V2-12 hydraulic thruster. The one-foot diameter stainless steel dual-props on the thruster are backed by 40 horsepower, generated from a two-pump (98cc each) hydraulic system. The pumps are mounted on each of the main engine gears for redundancy. With WESMAR’s unique counter-rotating prop technology that effectively churns out up to 40% more thrust, Captain Bachewicz gets the muscle and maneuverability needed to accomplish their delicate work with confidence.

The combination of the powerful WESMAR V2-12 thruster with the twin 57 inch dual props at the stern makes this tug a real ‘mover’ when it comes to the yard work it performs. Dual counter-rotating stainless steel Kaplan blades on the thruster yields more thrust per input power, and together with its low maintenance design, making it  a great choice for the job.