Dredging

Corvaden does not own a dredging fleet. It does not undertake capital dredging, channel deepening or land reclamation, and it is not competing with the contractors who do. That is stated first because it is the question a port engineer asks first, and because the answer does not change further down the page.

What Corvaden does is smaller and more specific. Siltation closes berth pockets, narrows intake channels and puts a quay face out of use, and the volumes involved are too small to interest a large contractor and too disruptive to leave. That work is accepted at limited scale, with plant contracted for the job and a survey before and after, so the quantity removed is a measured figure rather than an estimate on an invoice.

The second half is the part that follows directly from the rest of this site. A dredger is a working vessel with a hull, a machinery space, a pump, hydraulics and a great deal of wear, and it earns nothing while it is stopped. Cutter teeth, pump liners, suction pipe and ladder steel are consumable in a way little else at sea is. Corvaden repairs and renews them, alongside or on board, with the same crews and the same documentation as any other vessel.

If the scope is larger than this, Corvaden will say so at the enquiry stage and decline it. A dredging contract taken on beyond the plant available is a programme failure on a job where the port has already committed a berth.