Drydocking

The principle of drydocking is very easy; you build a floating steel double hulled shoe box of about 200 meters long. Take away the short sided walls and make sure it has more ballast tank capacity than the weight of the biggest ship you can accommodate inside your dock. Put enough ballast in to get the floor of your empty box deeper in the water than the draught of the ships you want to drydock. As soon as the vessel you want to dock is inside your box, put some ropes on the bow and stern to keep it exactly in the middle, de-ballast your box and it will come up taking the vessel inside complete out of the water. On this picture you see the Dutch chemical tanker Bastiaan Broere almost completely out of the water, resting firmly on its dock blocks of dock nr.2 of Damen Shiprepair in Schiedam