Ambitious new Dover-Calais ferry service

[Will]

My apologies - being deeply involved with work over the last couple of weeks, followed by a trip to England, meant that I clean forgot to pass on a piece of information from Lloyd's List, the shipping industry's daily paper, from late March. I was only reminded of it when looking up something about the new Portsmouth-Bilbao service.

A US company is backing a venture aiming to start operating fast ferries this summer across the English Channel out of Dover.

Chikara Holdings of Illinois owns 80% of new company Navmed, which has revealed plans to operate fast ferries from Dover to the French ports of Calais and Boulogne and possibly later to Ostend in Belgium. The company will trade under the brand name “highspeedferries”.

Navmed is finalising a deal to buy the two former Dover-based Hoverspeed 38-knot Seacat craft, Diamant and Rapide, from Sea Containers now that Hoverspeed is in liquidation.

But there are also plans to secure a larger catamaran, the 45 knot Spirit of Ontario, built by Austal in Australia, which has been operating on Lake Ontario linking the ports of Rochester, New York and Toronto. This craft can carry 774 passengers and 238 cars and is different from the other two craft.

Navmed is spearheaded by two directors with links with Hoverspeed. Jeff Richards was formerly with Hoverspeed’s parent company Sea Containers and Graham Brock ran the retail operations.

Mr Richards said: “We are not Hoverspeed rising out of the ashes. We deliberately did not buy the brand as we wanted to start with a clean sheet.”

It is planned to operate the two existing Seacats on a year-round basis to Calais and to recruit around 700 employees on a seasonal basis.

“We plan to replace the two smaller seacats by two bigger and faster craft at some time in 2006 or 2007,” Mr Richards said.

There is also talk of the company eventually operating fast craft out of Folkestone, once an important cross-Channel port but no longer having ferry links to Boulogne. There are already plans to provide berthing facilities at the French port.

Navmed’s proposals will take it into head-to-head competition with SpeedFerries, which operates a single fast craft out of Dover’s Eastern Docks to Boulogne.

It will also increase the already stiff competition pressures between the three ship operators — P&O Ferries, SeaFrance and Norfolkline — that have ferries sailing out of Dover