The Mamilossa in action on the water during trials.
WIGHT LIVING
VIDEO
AS NAMES of craft go, that of the shiny red hover that has been buzzing around the Island could hardly be more apposite.Someone, somewhere, thought long and hard about calling her Mamilossa. It is Abenaki Indian for “he who goes from water to the land.” The craft does exactly that.
It is, of course, the selling point of the hovercraft invented in Cowes by Sir Christopher Cockerell. It boldly goes where other waterborne craft cannot.
That is why it has been so successful on the Ryde-Southsea route, gliding across Ryde sands and Southsea shingle making a seamless transition to sea.
Hovertravel has been operating its ten-minute passenger service for 44 years and is the only all-year-round passenger service in the world. The service has carried more than 22 million passengers in that time.
The latest incarnation of Cockerell’s tin can and vacuum cleaner motor may have been built at St Helens, just ten miles away from the invention’s birthplace, but it has come a long, long way in technical terms.
Mamilossa was 25 months in the making down at Woodnutt’s Yard on St Helens Duver. She will be making her way as deck cargo to Canada, where, in the harsh environment of the St Lawrence Estuary she will be reeling in and dropping off buoys that mark safe channels.
Hoverwork will wave a fond farewell to Mamilossa on Monday, the multi-million-pound craft representing something of a sea change in terms of the technology that has been installed.
She is the latest in a long string of constantly evolving craft but unique in the fact that she was built from the ground up on the Duver. Usually, hulls are brought to St Helens and completed there.
There is a team of fewer than 50 people at St Helens and they have been part of fleshing out bare aluminium bones to cope with the huge stresses and strains involved with lifting shifting heavy weights at sea.
Her cockpit resembles that of an aircraft, packed full of switches, dials and displays. There are cameras that voyeuristically peek up skirts: only to check that hers are properly inflated.
Outside, there is the latest generation of spotlights that would burn paint at 20 paces.
At her heart beat four Caterpillar 12-cylinder diesel engines, each producing up to 1,125 horsepower that can power her 75-tonne bulk along at a maximum speed of 60mph.
But it is the Palfinger 650002 marine hydraulic knuckle boom crane that is the particularly interesting bit of kit.
It’s designed to lift progressively less weight as the boom is extended.
When the boom reaches its full 12 metres it is supposed to be able to pick up one-and-a-quarter tonnes and reel in the load.
The Canadians wanted to be assured that Mamilossa had been properly stress engineered, so she was set the task of lifting a skipful of shingle and sandbags weighing in at nearly five tonnes.
Not only did she do that in the yard, scribing wide arcs with her outstretched load, but she was taken out into The Solent to do the same thing, skip-lifting out among Palmerston’s follies.
As technical director, Bob Barton was the man at the sharp end during tests and sea trials, as he has been at all points of her construction. It is a big ask to put a craft like her together. She’s not a box of bits to be bolted together but a multi-million-pound one of a kind.
Bob is 61, Island born and bred and a well-seasoned engineering bloke.
He served his apprenticeship with Rolls Royce in Bristol and came back to the Island, first to Westland, working on the old SRN4 hovercraft for three years before coming to Hoverwork in 1974.
Down at the yard there is a sense of family and indeed, there is that in a very real sense. There are brothers, sons and a stepdaughter of many long-servers. Bob’s own son, Neil, is in the team that makes hovercraft skirts.
“It is fantastic for a team of people to build something like this, to breathe life into it, starting as we did from scratch just over two years ago,” said Bob.
The Hoverwork team formed the backbone of the build but there were no fewer than 14 Island specialist companies and five from the mainland involved in the build for Canada.
The Canadian Coast Guard has been a faithful customer to the Island hovercraft Industry since the 1960s when it took delivery of its first five-tonne SRN5, manufactured by Saunders Roe.
This latest order will be the seventh designed and built at Hoverwork for the Canadians.
And Mamilossa seems to have been well received.
Canadian Coast Guard project manager Frank Jess spent two weeks checking her out.
“It has been a pleasure working alongside Hoverwork, its management team and staff during the construction of the hovercraft. I am confident the craft will be a valuable asset to the Canadian Coast Guard,” he said.
Hoverwork, too, is very optimistic about further worldwide orders for its craft to retain its skilled workforce in the wake of Hoverwork and Hovertravel coming under the wing of a new, much larger, organisation.
The order comes despite the current global economic crisis.
Importantly, the hovercraft has pumped an estimated £4 million into the Island’s deflating economy.