Tugs Move An Eight Hundred Tonne Shipyard Crane Across The Adriatic
An 800-tonne Goliath ship-lift crane has been carried across the northern Adriatic on a semi-submersible heavy-lift barge, in an operation that required nine tugs at various stages of the voyage. The crane was built at a construction yard south of Venice and delivered to a large Italian shipbuilding group's facility near the Slovenian border, where it will serve the yard's lifting and launching operations for years to come.
The load was moved from a quayside at Chioggia to Monfalcone aboard a 2022-built semi-submersible barge of 15,675 gross tons. The barge measures 152 metres in length with a 38-metre beam, offers around 5,150 square metres of deck space and is rated for heavy cargo of up to 28,500 tonnes, with a deck strength of 35 tonnes per square metre. Those figures gave the operation ample margin for a single crane, but the awkward geometry of a fully assembled gantry made the tow anything but routine.
Four harbour tugs pulled the barge off the quayside at the departure port and manoeuvred it into open water, where a single anchor handling tug took up the towline for the passage across the Gulf of Trieste. On arrival, four more harbour tugs took control, guiding the loaded barge into the port and pushing it against the shipyard quay so the crane could be discharged and positioned within the facility. The sequence is a familiar one for project cargo of this size, where the risk sits less in the sea passage than in the confined final approach.
The manufacturer described the mobilisation as a landmark for its business, noting that the shipment was the first of two such cranes destined for the same yard. Its chief executive said the operation confirmed the company's ability to turn complex engineering demands into workable and reliable solutions, and that watching the first unit set sail was a source of considerable pride for the engineering teams involved.
Goliath cranes of this class are central to modern shipbuilding, spanning building docks and allowing yards to lift and position very large pre-assembled blocks rather than joining smaller sections in place. Installing one is therefore a capacity decision as much as a capital one, signalling an intention to build bigger or faster. For the towage and heavy-transport contractors involved, meanwhile, jobs of this kind have become steady work as European yards refit their infrastructure for larger hulls, naval programmes and offshore energy structures that have outgrown the equipment installed a generation ago.
