The AIDAbella is set for a nine-day drydocking at Lloyd Werft in Germany starting April 2.

“She’s an eye-catching ship but it’s not that big of a job,” said Rüdiger Pallentin. That however will not be the most important thing for the Member of the Executive Board of Lloyd Werft Bremerhaven AG when the 69,203-ton AIDAbella arrives in the yard for technical work.

It will be the first time that a ship belonging to the AIDA fleet has called at Lloyd Werft for technical work. And for Pallentin that’s what counts most in order to illustrate the wider spectrum of capabilities now available to the yard in the wake of yard restructuring.

Just a few meters away from where the cruise ship will dock the drilling platform supply vessel land Centurion has been docked for several months for conversion up into a highly specialized well service vessel for oil and gas reserves in deep North Sea waters. For Pallentin the two vessels, taken together, demonstrate the wide breadth of work which the future Lloyd Werft will be in a position to cope with.

Island Centurion however embodies future potential on which Rüdiger Pallentin is pinning his hopes, according to a prepared statement from the German yard.

“This job demands all our know-how, experience, flexibility and engineering knowledge”, he said. “It will be a complicated conversion into a specialized vessel of the highest quality – just the kind of job we like and one which will demonstrate our capabilities.”

Also still part of Lloyd Werft’s portfolio in future, however, is the repair, maintenance, conversion and completion of cruis ships

“AIDA Cruises is a new customer for us and it does not matter how big the job is,” added Pallentin.