Coastwise Completes Landing Craft Design

Coastwise Corporation recently completed a landing craft design for Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska. The vessel is a shallow water roll-on/roll-off (RoRo) passenger and vehicle ferry. The Juneau-based naval architecture and marine engineering firm designed this 65 foot aluminum landing craft to operate on the Naknek River and Lake carrying passengers and heavy equipment to remote Brooks Camp, “Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes.”

This new 65 foot vessel has a beam of 21 feet, travels at eight knots, operates with a crew of two and can carry ten passengers. It was designed to carry full size road graders, loaders, and tanker trucks. The vessel’s aluminum ramp is designed to load these heavy vehicles from un-improved beaches. Designated as a day-boat the ro/ro landing craft will operate June to mid-September and be hauled out of the lake, prior to freeze up. Fully loaded the vessel draws just over three feet of water.

“This landing craft design was a challenging project,” said Patrick Eberhardt, Coastwise Corporation’s owner and principal engineer. “We visited Katmai and saw the shallow boulder strewn river, difficult maneuvering, and beach landing sites (with floating pumice rocks) where the vessel will operate. Our design effort resolved a complicated mission in a pretty demanding environment,” said Eberhardt.

“We are particularly happy with our new shallow water landing craft hull form,” said Eberhardt. “This vessel is designed to be extremely stable and fuel efficient, it directs significant astern thrust under the vessel, and yet it draws very little water. Based on our model tests, we expect this to be a very successful parent hull form and look forward to using it in other Alaskan landing craft designs.” Coastwise Corporation prepared detail design drawings and a construction specification that was used by the National Park Service to put the vessel project out to bid. The vessel’s construction was recently awarded to Allen Marine, Inc. of Sitka Alaska, which specializes in aluminum vessel construction. Coastwise will be the owner’s representative during the construction phase of the project.