A floating dock for the new overhaul shipyard for yachts in Bijela arrives in Boka

The floating dock, which the concessionaire of the shipyard port of Bijela, the company Adriatic 42 from Tivat, recently bought in Turkey, will arrive at the anchorage of the port of Zelenika in Boka Kotorska on Friday morning.

It is the first time that a new ship repair capacity of this type has arrived in Boke Bay after 41 years, because the last new floating dock with a carrying capacity of 3.500 tons arrived here back in 1981 in the Tivat Arsenal from Trogir, where that dock was built for the needs of the then Tivat military shipyard.

The floating dock purchased in Turkey by the company Adriatic 42 is significantly larger: it is 180 meters long and 37 meters wide, and it can lift ships weighing up to 10.000 tons from the sea for overhaul. The characteristics of this dock, built in 2017 in the Turkish shipyard Hat-San Shipyard, allow it to accommodate the largest yachts in the world.

In the future, it will be the main dock capacity of the new ship repair center for mega and super yachts, which is being developed by the company Adriatic 42 on the site of the former Adriatic shipyard Bijela.

That company is a joint venture - a consortium of Tivat's Porto Montenegro and Drydocks World, part of the DP World Group from the United Arab Emirates. Adriatic 42 received a 30-year concession for the use of the shipyard port of Bijela and so far, in preparation for the start of operations and providing services to yachts coming to Montenegro, which is expected by the end of this year, it has invested about 40 million euros, of which most of it relates to the purchase of a floating dock in Turkey.

With the start of the service center Adriatic 42, the industrial ship repair business in Bijela will be restored, which has a tradition here for almost a century, with a break in the past seven years since the former Adriatic shipyard was sent into bankruptcy by the Government of Montenegro in mid-2015.

By the way, the floating dock left the Turkish port of Yalova towards Bijela on June 14 in the tow of the large Norwegian tugboat "FFS Arion". The tug, which, including the tug and the dock itself, is 420 meters long in total, has been moving for the past ten days at a speed between 4 and 6 knots for several hundreds of nautical miles along the shores of the Dardanelles Straits, as well as the Sea of ​​Marmara, the Aegean, the Ionian and finally the Adriatic Otrantska vrata, the tugboat sailed in today.

Naval pilot, captain Željko Malović, will introduce a tugboat consisting of the 45-meter-long "FFS Arion" and a 180-meter-long floating dock into Boke Bay.

At the anchorage of the port of Zelenika on Friday morning, floating while it will meet and be inspected by the Montenegrin maritime authorities and give it the so-called free traffic, after which it will be brought to Bijela by the tugboats "Boka Bay" and "Boka Sky" of the local company "Boka Pilot & Tug Service", which will work for Adriatic 42 in the future, and positioned next to the already prepared permanent infrastructure - pylons and so-called fortifications through which the dock will be fixed in the position where it will work in the water area of ​​the future service center for yachts.