Marine Work Takes Off on Waterfront
Waterfront homeowners are taking advantage of low interest rates and using the spare cash to install pontoons and jetties worth up to $50,000.
In what are meant to be hard times, Pacific Pontoon and Pier at West Burleigh, Australia’s largest private marina construction company, said it was experiencing new demand. In the past four weeks, $7 million in new contracts had been signed, mostly for refurbishments of major marinas, including an upgrade of two arms of the Hope Harbour marina. Private homeowners were also keeping the local firms busy. After the shocking quiet of the global financial crisis, Chief Operating Officer Rob Donaldson said things were looking up.
From its industrial yard the size of four football fields, he said the team had been flat out casting concrete slabs to service the new clients. Mr Donaldson said during the boom one marina contract alone could be worth $5 million. Now the business is taking smaller contracts – but more of them – which meant none of the 45 full-time staff have had to be made redundant. Mr Donaldson said it was obvious when the gloom hit that multimillion dollar jobs were no longer rolling in. “It just dried up overnight about April last year,” said Mr Donaldson. “We had some jobs to finish off so that kept us going for a couple of months.” But with interest rates low, private waterfront owners started filling the vacuum. “People on the water are putting in $30,000 to $50,000 in pontoons in what was meant to be a recession,” said Mr Donaldson. “That was a dramatic turnaround in the market.”
Mr Donaldson said the company was now embarking on five marina refurbishment projects across Australia. These included installing 105 berths at Lake Macquarie’s Marmong Point development, 95 berths at Townsville’s breakwater marina and 44 at Hope Island’s Hope Harbour. At Hope Island, two arms of the marina are being demolished and floats will be trucked over and jig-sawed together in the next two weeks.
It is steady work for barge driver John Wilson, a ‘monster of a man’ who has been with the company 12 years and has made a career of his brawn. The bulky boatman is a Queensland arm-wrestling champion and uses his strength to chain, transport and drive in seabed pylons weighing up to five tonnes each. Mr Donaldson said it was possible to keep busy during a recession and he expected the demand would only improve.
by Kathleen Donaghey
The Gold Coast Bulletin
