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Boskalis hopper dredgers Causeway and Freeway have been working hard for several months on beach and foreshore replenishment of Ameland, The Netherlands.
On the western side of this Wadden island, the beach has been reinforced with approximately 2.5 million cubic meters of sand, while on the eastern side, work is taking place on the foreshore.
This spring, the Freeway was the first vessel to dredge off the coast of Ameland. This was a deliberate choice, since the Freeway had to dredge the access channel around the island to literally create space for the project.
Both the Causeway and Freeway needed to extract sand from the North Sea and then transport it through the newly created channel to the beach on the west side.
There, the sand was pumped to shore via a combination of floating, sinker, and land pipelines, where the project team used dry earthmoving equipment to divide the sand on the beach.
Without dredging the access channel to the required depth the Causeway and Freeway, when fully loaded with sand, would not have been able to access the project site.
In this way, one sister helped the other. A third sister vessel – the Strandway – also joined the project on Ameland to assist with the dredging work.
Rijkswaterstaat expects that in the coming months, until 2026, approx. 3 million cubic meters of sand will be deposited on the seabed just off the Ameland coast.