OUR NEW RESCUE VESSEL

Tauranga's new rescue vessel has been designed entirely for on-water rescue functionality.  Everything on the vessel serves the purpose of helping the crew perform best practice.    From housing items as small as night vision units, to the side fenders which allow the vessel to barge alongside other boats without causing damage to either vessel.  This $2,700,000 vessel is being built by Q-West Boat Builders and will be ready to take to the water by December 2023.

Our designer, Teknicraft, have designed a 14.8m foil-supported catamaran with a  5.5m beam.  The foil support will allow for a softer ride and will support the weight of the vessel at speed.  The size of this new vessel makes it slightly larger than the rescue vessel it will be replacing.  The draft is 0.7m which still allows the vessel to navigate in fairly shallow waters.

The cruising speed of the vessel will be 28 to 30 nautical miles per hour, which exceeds the maximum speed of our current vessel. This increase in speed allows the new vessel to potentially attend to a vessel in distress at Major Island at least 40min faster.  

Even though there is a 350hp increase in engine power in the new vessel, it will cruise faster than our current CRV’s top speed and will consume at least 60 litres of diesel an hour less when doing so.  This is partly due to the engine’s electronically controlled unit injectors that give low exhaust emissions with good fuel economy, thus making it a more economical vessel to run.

OUR BUILD PROGRESS

THE SPECS

The new vessel’s propulsion system is the HamiltonJet AVX (Advanced Vessel Control) HTX 30 jets.  Part of the AVX system is the recently added JETanchor.  JETAnchor provides a range of new capabilities with two automatic operational modes: ‘station keeping’ and ‘virtual anchor’ mode.  The HTX 30 has a maximum output of 570kW of power.  Its hydrodynamic design delivers 7% more high-speed efficiency and a 19% increase in peak bollard pull.  The JETanchor positioning system (with a MouseBoat) is in addition to the current blue ARROW features and will allow the rescue vessel operator the ability to use the new automatic modes for many operational requirements, as well as the existing manual manoeuvring modes.

• The JETanchor positioning system will provide our crew the following  benefits:

• More accurate station keeping than can be done manually.

• Significant reduction in operator workload.

• Reduction of crew fatigue & noise levels during standby operations.

• Reduction of operational crew numbers.

• Improves safety and reduces fuel consumption.

• Accurate GPS positioning for survey work, ROV deployments, etc.

• The ‘Station Keeping’ mode gives the operator the ability to automatically hold vessel position more accurately than is possible using manual control using GPS positioning and computer-controlled override of the vessel.

• Selecting  ‘Virtual Anchor’ mode allows the system to set  a single GPS point mooring for hands-free standby operations keeping the vessel in a comfortable position

• Low-speed precision MouseBoat manoeuvring control of a vessel with one hand.

NAVIGATION

Boating navigation has moved a long way from paper charts, and whilst a Coastguard vessel must still have paper charts on board, the use of digital equipment has continued to grow.  Just like a car, turn-by-turn navigation, and even autopilot, is now a common feature. 

Tauranga Volunteer Coastguard was able to look at the latest offerings from Ray Marine and were sold on its in-depth features, yet simple-to-naviagte user interface.   Ray Marine has been the supplier of all USA Coastguard vessels for five years now.  This partnership has resulted in "Search and Rescue" and "First Responders" features being added to Ray Marine equipment.  

One of the features that was of particular interest was the ability to generate search patterns at the push of a button.  This feature can now even be drawn up on land by the Incident Management Team and then sent (via the internet) to the vessel's navigation equipment.  The helm person can even initiate Autopilot and the vessel will steer the search pattern course by itself.

Another piece of valuable equipment is FLIR.  This is a high-powered camera (30x zoom) with thermal imagining.  This can be very useful when searching for a person in the water, as well as vessel identification.  Because FLIR is owned by Ray Marine, the systems integrate easily and allows functions only available to Ray Marine equipment (such as ClearCruise Augmented Reality, and Colour Thermal Vision).

The radar will be the new Cyclone Open Array Pro. These radars use CHIRP pulse compression, beam sharpening technology, and RangeFusion (technology that combines short and long pluses into a single high-clarity image) at a speed of 60rpm imaging.