New technology and more employees are in the compass headings of Canadian Maritime Engineering (CME) as the company steers itself towards a brighter and busier future along Port Alberni’s waterfront.
The maritime company, which offers a range of services including marine and industrial manufacturing and vessel refits, is poised to greatly expand its business in the coming months.
Key to this expansion is a new 450-tonne marine travel lift which is currently being constructed in the United States and is expected to be up and running in Port Alberni in late August or early September, according to CME’s Operations Manager Brandon Larochelle.
”What the travel lift does is it goes out on a dock system, it lowers slings into the water, it raises the boat completely out of the water and travels it onto land and then we put it on blocks,” Larochelle says. Currently the company pulls vessels out using a marine railway system with the vessel having to stay on the railway until the repair work is completed.
This new system will allow company employees to work on multiple vessels at the same time since they will have been transferred to land.
”We can now fill up our entire property with boats and have up to 15 or however many boats we can sit on our property at one time as opposed to one on the go,” he says.
The upgrade will mean a lot more business and recognition for CME. ”We’re a company on the map, it’s going to create a lot of positions in town here and huge revenue streams and just an overall benefit to Port Alberni.”
The upgrade raises the weight limit of vessels from the current 300 tonnes to 450 tonnes which is expected to attract customers from further distances.
At present, Canadian Maritime Engineering services primarily local vessels, including those used for commercial or recreational fishing, whale watching, work boats or landing crafts.
“It (the lift) will be the largest of its kind between San Diego and Alaska so the target audience now grows from local to continent-wide,” Larochelle says. He reports that calls have already been coming in from other parts of Canada from mariners wondering when the expanded yard will be up and running.
American vessel owners are expected to now be more interested in having work done here, in large part because of the advantageous exchange rate but also because there will be a closer repair depot.
Canadian Maritime Engineering hopes to have all of the pile driving and pre-cast work done on the jetty system before the lift arrives and has set a target date of the end of August for the new equipment to be up and running.
The purchase and installation of the new $4.5 million system comes after six years of planning, engineering and environmental surveys conducted by CME. Larochelle says the search is also currently on for the 40-60 new positions that will need to be filled to meet the anticipated demand.
”It’s a bit of a scramble. I haven’t had to staff up for something of this nature yet. I’ve had to staff up for different phases of different construction projects, this is a whole other animal,” Larochelle says.
There are not a lot of facilities on the west coast that will be doing what CME has planned but using the ‘if you build it they will come’ philosophy Larochelle expects to have no problem filling those positions.
”It’s not that hard to convince people when you’re offering a good opportunity. We have over-and-above wages in town and we are a union shop which guarantees those rates across the board. I do believe we will get where we need to be in short order.”
He says the upgrade will make an exciting addition not only for Port Alberni but also the entire marine industry along the west coast.
