Dredgers faced epic journeys

EARLIER this year, I wrote about the former Garvel Shipyard of George Brown & Company (Marine) receiving an order for a passenger and vehicle ferry at the start of 1961.

Launched in February the following year, the vessel, named N A Comeau, faced a long delivery voyage as she was for service on Canada’s St Lawrence River.

The ferry order came only a month after George Brown was contracted to build the dredger pictured undergoing trials in February, 1962.

It involved another long delivery voyage as the dredger Kakuluwa was ordered by the Government of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) with Colombo as her home port. Henry Abram, the Glasgow ship delivery specialists, provided the crew.

The Greenock yard received news in the closing week of March, 1962, that the dredger had safely arrived at Colombo after a voyage that took 46 days and covered 7,000 miles.

Heavy weather was experienced in the Bay of Biscay before the dredger called at Centa in North Africa. Her next stop was at Port Said in Egypt before going through the Suez Canal.

The longest leg of the voyage was 2,000 miles of open water in the Indian Ocean from Aden to Colombo.

The dredger’s arrival at her home port came in the same month that George Brown received another order from Ceylon. It was for a salvage and berthing tug to serve the Colombo Port Commission.

George Brown was not the only Scottish company to win work from the customer. At the same time the Colombo Port Commission ordered a pair of diesel railway shunting locomotives, weighing 65 tons, to be built by George Barclay & Sons, Kilmarnock.

I have been unable to trace if dredger Kakuluwa still exists but the vessel appears to have been in service with the port authority into the first half of the 2000s.

The tug ordered by the Colombo Port Commission in 1962 was called Vasabha. A tug of the same name is listed as sailing under the flag of Sri Lanka but she was built in 2014.

George Brown & Company (Marine) built around 220 vessels at the Garvel yard, known locally as ‘Siberia’ because of its exposed location.