European Commercial Marine Award winners

The award winners and runners up of the European Commercial Marine Awards were announced at Seawork 2017, sponsored by Servogear and Brunvoll.

Taking place on site at the Golden Arrow Restaurant, the awards were a spectacular evening showcasing the latest and greatest innovations and talent within the commercial marine sector.

The overall winner of the Spirit of Innovation award 2017 was Blueye Robotics with its innovative Blueye Pioneer, a 'pro-sumer' level underwater camera drone. Runner-up was Garmin Europe with the inReach Satellite Communicators. The ECMA judging panel were united in their excitement over the Blueye Pioneer, with ECMA judging panel Chairman Jake Frith stating that "this clever device could pay for itself with just one saved commercial diving day."

Category winners included MICAD s.r.l, winner of the Vessel design & Design construction with the MODCAT Project.

The Marine Engineering and Construction winner was Dynamic Load Monitoring Ltd, for its Subsea Datalogging Tensile Link. Runner-up went to Tidal Anchors Ltd for the Tidal Anchor.

The Marine Equipment and Electronics category was won by Reygar for its product, BareFLEET. Runner-up was awarded to the explosion proof work light NOVA-EX R product, distributed by SMG.

This was followed by the announcement of the Safety and Training category, which was awarded to Survitec for its Rope Access 3D 275N Life Jacket. With the Seabob Rescue, distributed by Landau UK, as runner-up.

Finally the Diving and Underwater category winner was Blueye Robotics for its Blueye Pioneer. Jatronic AS was awarded runner up for its Pressure Operated Actuator, POA.T

The winner of the Maritime Professional of the year award, sponsored by GGTC was Barry Sales. Barry is a long standing member of the commercial marine community, working as a technical manager at Cheetah Marine.

Barry was nominated by his colleague, Lucy Strevens at Cheetah Marine, who commented: "Barry is a hugely dedicated member of the Cheetah Team who’s passion for boating has been incremental in all aspects of the business from client relations to detailed aspects of the build process."

The Marine Sustainability award winner was CarenEcolo, for its Mobile Filtration Unit product. Jean-Yvon Turpaud, technical sales, said: “We are delighted, but surprised to have won this award from the Innovations Showcase, we did not expect to win so it was a great joy! It is the first time we have exhibited at a show outside of France, we saw that there was an Innovations Showcase, so we decided to come here to make our product known outside the French market.”

This mobile filtration unit is composed of a water collecting tarpaulin with inflatable sides where the boat is placed for high pressure cleaning.

The water and debris is then pumped into the the filtration unit to be decontaminated of paint, fuel, grease, biocides, lead, TBT, copper and other toxic materials. It offers a solution for ports not equipped with a recuperation and filtration area and is mibile so costs can be shared between ports.

Casper Vermeulen, of Damen Shipyards was presented with the Lifetime Achievement award. Casper's first job as UK Sales Manager for Damen had been to attend the first Seawork show, and this 20th edition of Seawork was his last.