Over the weekend, Pacific Shipyards International wrapped up its biggest maintenance project yet at its Honolulu Harbor facility, where shipyard workers over 90 days put the Coast Guard's CGC Kimball, one of the service's large national security cutters, through its first dry dock maintenance period.
“This is the longest ship we've docked here, ” said Iain Wood, president and CEO of PSI.
Commissioned in 2019, the Kimball is the Coast Guard's seventh national security cutter and, along with the CGC Midgett, is one of two home-ported in Honolulu. The two vessels belong to one of the Coast Guard's largest class of vessels at 418 feet long, 54 feet wide, with a water displacement of 4, 500 long tons and an operating range of 12, 000 nautical miles. Getting the contract to work on them required PSI to set up a new dry dock.
“PSI invested in the new dry dock to support Hawaii's commercial and (military ) maritime community, ” Wood said. “In anticipation of the national security cutter's arrival in Hawaii, we purposefully designed the dry dock and specialty docking towers to safely support the cutter, so it is very gratifying to have successfully completed its repair and maintenance in our dry dock.”
The Kimball has already made multiple deployments in the Pacific. Most recently, the vessel and its crew performed a 42-day, 10, 000-nautical-mile western Pacific patrol, making its way to Japan to train with the…
