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Hansa Heavy Lift Ship HHL Tokyo IMO #9448346
Our Waterfront Correspondent in Victoria BC, Murray Polson, recently captured a fascinating series of images of the Hansa Heavy Lift vessel HHL Tokyo as she loaded a large yacht onto her deck from the harbour. Polson regularly scours the waterfront for pictures and captures ship portraits of the vessels arriving and resident in the harbour there. Victoria is a relatively small port but regularly receives interesting visitors such as the HHL Tokyo.
Brand new, the HHL Tokyo was built in 2011 at Hudong Zhonghua Shipbuilding Group, China and registered in Antigua Barbuda. She is owned by Hansa Heavy Lift GmbH in Hamburg Germany who currently operates 17 multipurpose heavy-lift freighters and thus presides over the largest fleet in the heavy–lift and project market. IMO #9448346. (168.68m x 25.2m x 9.5m 17644gt 19496dwt 16.8kts max and 14.9kts average).
Murray reports: "It is easier on the yacht and the crew of seven (and cheaper too) to transport from one location in the world to another as deck cargo rather than fighting through heavy seas in blue water. The yacht shown being loaded is the Winning Drive, a Westport 130 William Garden designed 'super yacht' built in Westport WA USA (Gregory C. Marshall Naval Architect Ltd.). There is no port of registry shown on her hull but she was built in 2007 (39.62m x 7.62m x 1.9m) and has 10 guest cabins. She was longer than the distance between the two cranes lifting her. Consequently the Supercargo had to ‘twist’ her to fit through the gap between the cranes and settle her on her cradle for the trip. The old tug already aboard is the Wallace Foss – built in 1897 as the Oscar B. she was sold in 1913 to Rouse Towing and ended up owned by the prominent Foss Towing Co. in Seattle WA USA when they took over Rouse Towing. They sold her as a yacht in 1972 and now she is leaving the Pacific Northwest."
Site News: April 25, 2024
The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 92,359 vessel histories (with 15,634 images and 13,293 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters). The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,616 entries (with 4,013 images).
In 2023 the Nauticapedia celebrated the 50th Anniversary of it’s original inception in 1973 (initially it was on 3" x 5" file cards). It has developed, expanded, digitized and enlarged in those ensuing years to what it is now online. If it was printed out it would fill more than 300,000 pages!
My special thanks to our volunteer IT adviser, John Eyre, who (since 2021) has modernized, simplified and improved the update process for the databases into a semi–automated processes. His participation has been vital to keeping the Nauticapedia available to our netizens.
Also my special thanks to my volunteer content accuracy checker, John Spivey of Irvine CA USA, who has proofread thousands of Nauticapedia vessel histories and provided input to improve more than 11,000 entries. His attention to detail has been a huge unexpected bonus in improving and updating the vessel detail content.