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ne of the oldest and largest ship- ping companies in the Netherlands, Royal Wagenborg has always been


a pioneer and today it continues to be at the forefront of developments. Wagenborg undoubtedly forges its own path; there cannot be many companies in the world that have one of their original vessels built into the very heart of their headquarters, the 114-year-old Dutch Tjalk “Liberté”.


Established in 1898 in Delfzijl in the north of the Netherlands, Wagenborg originally traded in “hout & zout” – wood and salt - in the Baltic region. Gradually, the company expanded into South Europe and the Medi- terranean and in the nineties it started to go further afield into the Great Lakes, creat- ing its own “golden triangle”. More recently Wagenborg has extended its services to South America and Africa. In the late nine- ties the company also moved offshore and created Wagenborg Offshore.


Wagenborg employs around 3,000 people worldwide and manages 230 vessels, in- cluding multipurpose vessels, ro-ro vessels, icebreakers, accommodation units, ferries and tugs. For its Captain-owners and its own fleet, the company provides chartering, crewing, insurance, technical/fleet manage- ment, as well as sale and purchasing. In addition, Wagenborg provides heavy lift and transport solutions via subsidiary Nedlift and operates 400 trucks and 250,000 sq m of warehousing space. This diverse compa- ny had a turnover of E630 million in 2011.


Ice class fleet Bob Derks joined Wagen- borg in 1998 and was responsible for the projects and newbuilding department and later went on to Offshore. MARIN has long been a partner of Wagenborg for various performance verification and model tests. He comments that in fact most of its offshore and shipping activities involve ice and all of the fleet is ice classed.


MARIN has been involved in several verifi- cation tests including those for the Rijnborg, an open top, ice classed container vessel. Mv Rijnborg is especially suitable for feeder services in the Baltic, which are characterised by short sailing distances, fast turn-around


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behaviour, including fine tuning the revised Load Lines Convention by analysing the impact of varying the height of the bow, hatch-coaming and breakwater on the amount of green water shipped on the hatchcovers.


Verification tests Wagenborg has also taken part in several Joint Industry Projects at MARIN such as the “Design for service” project, with participants including Damen Shipyards, MARIN, TU Delft and Conoship. Essentially this looked into the proposal that a ship should be designed for an oper- ational profile and not just one design con- dition. The Dutch group also took part in the Lashing@Sea and REFIT2save projects.


Bob Derks: “All of the fleet is ice classed”


times and heavy ice trading in winter, while complying with strict environmental legisla- tion. MARIN also carried out the very well known one-year monitoring & measurement cam- paign onboard the Victoriaborg and it tested the M-borg vessel type for its seakeeping


Wagenborg is one of those pioneering firms involved in opening up.extremely remote and challenging regions such as the North Caspian. When a Shell consortium started work on the first phase of the Kashagan oil field, which turned out to be the largest finding in 30 years, Wagenborg was asked to take part in a tender which it subsequently won. “We knew that there was a substantial challenge ahead,” Mr Derks stresses. “The North Caspian is an extremely environmen- tally sensitive area, with temperature


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