"A great honour, but also a great responsibility"
Erik Leenders is a senior ship designer at Kongsberg Maritime and has been involved in the adventure with ‘Reach Remote’ from the very beginning.
Leenders started his career as a designer in what was formerly Rolls-Royce Marine in 2009, after having worked for one year in the propulsion department of the same company since coming to Norway from the Netherlands in 2007.
In the Netherlands, he worked for 12 years at Damen Shipyards in the research and design departments, where he mostly worked with smaller workboats.
“In Kongsberg, I have worked with offshore vessels, but also a lot with research ships, remote-controlled ships and alternative fuels," he says.
Part of the team from the start
Recently, Leenders’ working day has largely consisted of working with "Reach Remote".
“In the ‘Reach Remote’ project, which is much more than ‘just’ a vessel, I am responsible for ship design, but I have been involved from the start in setting up the Concept of Operation and the philosophy documents and designing the project together with a system architect. Not least, I have participated a lot in the dialogue with Reach Subsea, which helped us with the further development of our concept,” he says.
Leenders was also involved in the precursor to the Reach Remote project, ROVrevolution, which was a collaboration between Kongsberg, Sintef, NTNU and a commercial operator that eventually became Reach Remote.
Small but complex
The ship designer describes ‘Reach Remote’ as a small but complex boat.
“The project is also far from being ‘just’ a boat; it is a larger system consisting of a - for now - small fleet of two vessels, a communication system and a Remote Operation Centre. Otherwise, it is a small boat with a large hole in the middle, which should be able to work for 30 days without people on board. The vessel can perhaps best be described as a floating power and communication centre for an ROV.”
The fact that there are no good and clear rules yet meant that those involved themselves had to find the way forward together with DNV and the Norwegian Maritime Authority is a situation Leenders describes as challenging, but interesting.
“The project started in the middle of the pandemic, and the project team did not meet physically until after one and a half years. It was a bit challenging at the start, but it actually went pretty well,” he says.
The biggest team
Working across the whole of Kongsberg Maritime and developing and integrating completely new products has been one of the most exciting and interesting things about the whole project, according to Leenders.
“It is by far the largest team I have worked with, and in addition to ship design also includes our departments within automation, communication, cyber security, situational awareness, electrical, remote operation centre, simulation, underwater sensors, deck machinery... And so on.”
Great honour, and great responsibility
When it became known that ‘Reach Remote’ had won the Ship of the Year 2024 award, Leenders sat with mixed feelings:
“It is a great honour, but at the same time also a great responsibility. Many of the ships that have won in the past have had challenges afterwards, but perhaps that is precisely why they win? The winner should be groundbreaking and ‘on the edge’,” concludes Leenders.