ISTANBUL, Türkiye – July 2025 – When a 17,300-tonne floating drydock needed to get from the shipyard in Yalova to San Diego, Kuehne+Nagel with Dutch heavy marine transport giant Boskalis didn’t just ship it— Every checklist had a checklist. Every bolt, cable, and tug movement was accounted for. Because moving the largest floating drydock ever built in Türkiye across oceans isn’t just logistics—it’s engineering choreography .
Managed with precision by Kuehne+Nagelthis impressive General Dynamics NASSCO dock is en route to its new home at the NASSCO shipyard in San Diego, California.
“We had checklists. Then we had checklists for the checklists,” said Aliye Erkan Bıyık, National Project Logistics Manager at Kuehne+Nagel Türkiye, offering a candid look into the complexity behind the scenes.
The assignment came from General Dynamics NASSCO, the American shipbuilding firm, and it was as straightforward as it was massive: get the drydock from Yalova to San Diego. But with no propulsion system of its own, the drydock first had to be towed into open waters by four tugboats, where it awaited its ride—BOKA Vanguard.
The vessel chosen for this Herculean task, BOKA Vanguard, belongs to Dutch heavy marine transport giant Boskalis. Known for its semi-submersible design, the Vanguard can carry structures even larger than itself. And with dimensions of 275 metres long and 75 metres wide, that’s saying something.
Maneuvering the drydock—253 metres in length, 54 metres wide, 21 metres tall—into position took days. Four tugboats worked in careful synchronicity, pushing and pulling the structure into place. Kuehne+Nagel’s engineering team, along with Boskalis’ crew, managed the operation like a live wire act—calculated, cautious, and with zero room for error.
“This wasn’t about brute force. This was about precision,” said Bıyık. “We double-checked every angle, every mooring line, every connection point. We even had support boats standing by to shuttle crew and tools between the drydock and carrier.”
Loading onto the Vanguard was only the first act. The journey itself spans 13,500 nautical miles, crossing both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. With no access to the Panama Canal due to the drydock’s immense size, the vessel is sailing the long route around South America’s Cape Horn—an unforgiving path where 20-metre waves are not uncommon.
The project’s scope challenges the idea that heavy-lift operations are just about getting cargo from A to B. This one took months of groundwork, simulations, calculations, marine weather forecasting, and regulatory coordination. From drafting engineering drawings to running risk assessments, everything had to align perfectly.
And yet, for all its complexity, there’s a simplicity to what was achieved—connect one coast to another, one continent to another, one industrial vision to another. It’s a reminder that in project logistics, scale doesn’t just mean weight or distance. It means detail, discipline, and coordination at a level few get to see, and even fewer get to execute.
As BOKA Vanguard powers across the open ocean with its colossal cargo strapped firmly to deck, the spotlight now turns to the final phase. In San Diego, Kuehne+Nagel’s U.S. team is ready to receive the drydock and oversee its last mile to NASSCO.
