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Wednesday, July 9, 2025

Manufacturer troubleshooting issues with Buccoo Reef ferry

by

NEWS DESK
1625 days ago
20210126
The Buccoo Reef, the newest ferry in the national fleet servicing the seabridge between Trinidad and Tobago. Image courtesy INCAT Tasmania.

The Buccoo Reef, the newest ferry in the national fleet servicing the seabridge between Trinidad and Tobago. Image courtesy INCAT Tasmania.

The lat­est fer­ry in the na­tion­al fleet, the Buc­coo Reef, re­port­ed­ly has en­coun­tered a few chal­lenges on her jour­ney home to Trinidad and To­ba­go, ac­cord­ing to a state­ment is­sued to­day by NID­CO, the Na­tion­al In­fra­struc­ture De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed.

NID­CO is re­port­ing in its re­lease that alarms on the ves­sel were trig­gered some 398 nau­ti­cal miles from Ho­bart, Tas­ma­nia, Aus­tralia, the man­u­fac­tur­ing hub. 

“While the tech­ni­cal as­sess­ment con­clud­ed that the jour­ney could have con­tin­ued, NID­CO de­cid­ed that the ves­sel should re­turn to Ho­bart—it be­ing the clos­est port of call—to in­ves­ti­gate these oc­cur­rences and take the nec­es­sary cor­rec­tive ac­tion to pre­vent their re­cur­rence,” NID­CO’s re­lease states.

It added: “The builder, IN­CAT Tas­ma­nia Pty Ltd, along with the orig­i­nal en­gi­neer­ing equip­ment man­u­fac­tur­ers are trou­bleshoot­ing and re­solv­ing the as­so­ci­at­ed is­sues.  NID­CO has re­quest­ed a test of ma­jor sys­tems up­on com­ple­tion of these ac­tiv­i­ties be­fore the ves­sel re­sumes its jour­ney to Trinidad.”

The Buc­coo Reef had left Ho­bart on Thurs­day 21 Jan­u­ary 2021, to be­gin its jour­ney home to T&T of some 9,266 nau­ti­cal miles.  That jour­ney has on­ly two stops—the first be­ing Pape’ete, French Poly­ne­sia; and the sec­ond at the Pana­ma Canal in Pana­ma.

The fer­ry orig­i­nal­ly was sched­uled to ar­rive in March 2021.

 

About the Buc­coo Reef

 

The ves­sel was built by Aus­tralian ship­builder IN­CAT Tas­ma­nia at its ship­yard in Ho­bart, Aus­tralia.

IN­CAT be­gan con­struc­tion on Buc­coo Reef in 2019.  The com­pa­ny says the new 100-me­ter, high speed fer­ry (Wave Pierc­ing Cata­ma­ran) has been retro­fit­ted with state-of-the-art elec­tron­ic sys­tems.

The ship will have an op­er­at­ing speed of over 40 knots, which re­duces the sail­ing time with an in­creased num­ber of cross­ings per day, and al­low­ing for same day trav­el, thus im­prov­ing in­ter-is­land ac­cess.

The Buc­coo Reef—named af­ter To­ba­go’s largest and most pop­u­lar coral reef—will have ca­pac­i­ty for 1,000 pas­sen­gers in three lounges, which will in­clude a range of bars and food ser­vice ar­eas.  The ve­hi­cle deck will have 175 truck lane me­tres and ca­pac­i­ty for 182 cars, or 239 cars, if trucks are not car­ried.  In ad­di­tion, cit­i­zens will be able to en­joy com­fort­able coach style trav­el.

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