A new boat park, with boat ramps and pontoons designed and built by world renowned marina builder Bellingham Marine, is giving boaters in North Queensland an opportunity to spend some time on the water this summer without having to endure long lines and flared tempers.
Townsville, Queensland, Australia – 17 December 2015 – For the residents of Townsville, the process of taking their boat out for a day on the water was filled with frustration. Long waits and lack of parking combined with the stress often associated with launching and retrieving a boat (especially by individuals newer to trailered boating) was creating frequent outbreaks of ramp rage at the city’s boat launch parks.
The small town of Townsville, located in North Queensland adjacent to the central section of the Great Barrier Reef, is heavily steeped in a culture of boating. The town has a population of 171,000 residents and nearly 26,000 of them have a boat under eight meters long. With only eleven existing boat ramps to service all the city’s boaters, the city was simply unable to handle the number of boats wanting to get on the water each day.
A vacant industrial property on Ross River provided the perfect location for a new boat park with ample room for parking and enough waterfront for the construction of four boat ramps, each with four lanes, and two public fishing pontoons.
Although the site was a perfect location, anticipated heavy public use, concerns of flooding and cyclone conditions, and the desire to make the park easily accessible during daylight as well as non-daylight hours required a number of unique design considerations in the construction of the ramps and pontoons.
To mitigate downward pressure on the pontoons during flood events the ramps’ walkways were designed by Bellingham Marine to be extra wide. Heavy duty steel piles with a double corrosion protection of epoxy paint and a HDPE sleeve were selected for durability and to handle extreme loading situations.
A mesh fence equipped with solar lighting was placed around the piles for safety during night and early morning use of the ramps. The facility’s staging pontoons were also equipped with large overhead solar powered lights. The use of solar powered lighting enabled to City to provide ample lighting without the need of running power down to the docks.
Heavy duty, 316 stainless steel components and an oversized double-waler system were utilized to ensure structural integrity during cyclonic and flood conditions.
The gangways servicing the two staging pontoons were designed with a minimal slope to provide disabled access.
The new park, known as the Townsville Recreational Boating Park, can easily handle accommodate hundreds of boaters a day with parking space for vehicles and trailers. Three of the four planned ramps have been built, the fourth ramp will be added in the next couple years.
As the world’s leading marina design-build construction company, Bellingham Marine specializes in floating dock, floating platform and floating wave attenuation systems for marinas worldwide. The company also produces dry storage systems for the upland storage of boats.
