Nippon Paint Marine Coats Grand Bahama Shipyard Ltd. Floating Dry Docks

March 17, 2026

Grand Bahama Shipyard’s East End floating dry dock on the heavy lift ship Boka Vanguard on its way to Freeport, Grand Bahama. © Nippon Paint Marine

Nippon Paint Marine, a marine coatings leader, has supplied its self-indicating epoxy coating NOA 60 HS, to protect two new floating dry docks for Grand Bahama Shipyard. The floating docks have a combined total of around 1.2 million square meters of surface to be protected. This equates to the area of over 168 full size FIFA football pitches. The dry docks, ‘East End’ and ‘Lucayan,' with lifting capacities of 120,000 tons, respectively, will expand the capacity at the yard in Freeport, Grand Bahama and will help to future-proof the repair yard in line with the growing sizes of planned cruise ships.

Grand Bahama Shipyard’s ‘East End’ and (left image) floating dry dock ‘Lucayan’ also under construction in China (right image). © Nippon Paint Marine

The largest of the two dry docks was built with an overall length of over 413 meters and a width of 85.11 meters. This provides capacity for the Grand Bahama Shipyard to conduct repair work to any cruise vessel in the global fleet. The floating docks are equipped with an automatic dock control system that enables automated floating and lowering operations. The two floating docks were constructed in China by CSSC Qingdao Beihai Shipbuilding Co., Ltd and are the largest of their type in the world.

NOA 60 HS is Nippon Paint Marine’s self-indicating epoxy coating, which provides long lasting anticorrosive protection in harsh marine environments. Crucially, NOA’s self-indicating technology assists sprayers, inspectors, the yard and owners to ensure that these heavy-duty coatings are applied to the correct thickness to ensure corrosion protection, especially on edges and corners where achieving the correct specified thickness is fundamental to long-term performance, essential on the huge areas that we needed to be coated.

Interior water ballast spaces showing coated structural framing (top left), coated internal bulkheads and stiffeners (top right), The bottom images show the effectiveness of NOA’s self indication. Areas of low thickness can be found visually even in areas where thickness gauges cannot be used. © Nippon Paint Marine

Nippon Paint Marine’s deck coating, NEOGUARD SPIKE was also specified for some areas on the docks. NEOGUARD SPIKE, formulated with a non-slip epoxy resin combined with a hard-wearing alumina aggregate, provides hardwearing and safe solutions for weather decks and passages. The coating has excellent resistance to impact damage as well as to seawater and chemicals. The coating is certified for low flame spread and is therefore suitable for the decks on platforms and internal safety decks on the docks.