A PIONEERING PARTNERSHIP

Tugdock Limited has announced a partnership with Sarens, the global leader and reference in crane rental services, heavy lifting and engineered transport.

To support the further growth of Tugdock, Sarens has invested in the Cornish start-up. The partnership will enable the two companies to offer an innovative solution to the fastgrowing floating offshore wind industry.

Lucas Lowe-Houghton, director of business development for Tugdock, explained: “The floating offshore wind sector is expected to continue to grow rapidly.

“However, very few of the world’s ports have sufficient water depth and assembly quay space to build the huge turbine floaters required and conventional dry docks are not wide enough as they were originally designed for ships. Tugdock’s patented marine buoyancy bag technology solves this issue. It allows floating dry docks to be delivered by road in modular form and assembled at the port to dimensions far wider than most of the world’s existing dry docks.”

CEO Shane Carr added: “Working in partnership with a large multinational such as Sarens will accelerate our development, enabling further innovation to keep us at the forefront of the floating offshore wind industry.”

A pioneering project attempting to restore climate change-fighting marine plants in Cornwall has got underway.

Cornwall Wildlife Trust has completed its first round of seagrass planting trials in the River Fal, thanks to funding from clothing brand Seasalt Cornwall.

The ‘Seeding Change Together’ project is using technology never previously trialled in Cornwall to study – and hopefully expand – the seagrass bed found at the Trust’s Fal-Ruan nature reserve.

Around 4,000 seeds were collected from stable and healthy meadows in the Fal Estuary at the end of last summer. Yet researchers were surprised that the seed pods collected yielded only a quarter of the seeds expected. Marine experts from the local nature charity are concerned that the summer’s prolonged periods of high temperatures may have affected the seeds’ development.

Sophie Pipe, seagrass project officer at Cornwall Wildlife Trust, said: “We