The Port of Tauranga putting a $50 million capital dredging programme to deepen the harbour channels out ton tender.

The Port company's board approved the expenditure at the AGM last week in an effort to accommodate the next generation of container ships.

The dredge Pelican will probably be too small for the capital works programme.

Port of Tauranga Property & Infrastructure Manager Dan Kneebone says the tenders can be called anytime over the next three months or so.

'In terms of time frames, we are expecting to have the dredging completed by the third quarter of 2016,” says Dan today.

'Which means logically, we will be starting the dredging in the 2015 calendar year – but beyond that we haven't got any dates locked in. It could actually be early 2015 before we call tenders about it. It's over the next three or four months.”

The dredging programme is part of the Port's ongoing $250 million capital development programme that has seen the commissioning of the Sulphur Point terminal's seventh container crane in March.

The port also has two new tug boats under construction due for delivery early next year to cater for the larger ships that will soon be regular callers to the port.

Each will have bollard pulls of 74 tonnes, compared with the current tugs' bollard pulls of 50, 40 and 28 tonnes. The new tugs will replace the 36-year-old Kaimai and the 21-year-old Te Matua.

In his report to the AGM, chief executive Mark Cairns says since 1997, the average length of container ships calling at Tauranga increased from 170 metres to more than 207 metres.

A significant number of callers are now longer than 260 metres and this trend accelerated over the last year.

'Last month,” he says, 'we had a record 4308 TEU exchange in a single vessel call over 24 hours through the Port. The sustained vessel rate of 116 moves per hour allows us to hold our head up high when compared with global benchmarking standards.”