The newly built ship was officially named with a blessing ceremony in the presence of members of parliament, heads of local and regional institutions, and many guests. The ship’s godmother was the renowned journalist from Vidin, Sonya Machorska.
The vessel is equipped with specialized equipment for monitoring the riverbed and will conduct surveys in the Bulgarian section of the Danube River. The vessel was purchased within the framework of the project “Creation of a River Information System in the Bulgarian part of the Danube River – BULRIS”, funded by the Operational Programme “Transport” 2007-2013. The project beneficiary is State Enterprise “Port Infrastructure”.
Traditionally, information for creating bathymetric maps, which depict the condition of the riverbed, is obtained through profiles of the bottom relief captured by conventional single-beam echo sounders. No matter how dense the profile network, this approach leaves unexplored zones outside the observation range.
The new system uses digital techniques and technologies for bottom mapping that provide complete coverage of the surveyed area. The multibeam echo sounder with which the vessel is equipped provides information not only about depths, but also about the type of bottom sediments and their dynamics, various objects on the bottom, and numerous other phenomena. With these qualities, echo sounders of this class today have primary importance as a data source in modern seabed and riverbed research. The information obtained from riverbed surveys is of vital importance both for navigation safety on the Danube River and for planning hydrotechnical construction, maintaining port water areas, conducting geomorphological and geological studies, discovering sunken objects, including locating bottom inhabitants for marine biology and fishing industry needs.
The monitoring system also includes a ground-based, stationary center for storing and archiving the obtained data and for their processing.
The motor vessel “BULRIS” was built in a shipyard in Greece and is registered according to Bulgarian legislation with the Executive Agency “Maritime Administration” under the Bulgarian flag.
The vessel is equipped with the necessary navigation equipment for performing voyages on the Danube River: DGPS, AIS (Automatic Identification System), complex interface integrated with radar, VHF radio station with built-in ATIS decoder – stationary, with frequency range corresponding to the Regional Agreement on the Radiotelephone Service on Inland Waterways.
Ship Captain: Pavel Stoyanov Kosov
On March 17, 1935, the steam tugboat “Iskar” made the first voyage between Vidin and Ruse, while in the opposite direction the voyage was made by the ship “Vit”. Historians believe that this marked the beginning of Bulgarian state shipping on the Danube River. In 1924, the Bulgarian state purchased three steam tugboats from Italy: “Vit”, “Iskar” and “Osam”, which were subsequently converted into passenger ships with 100 seats each. In just one year, the ships “Iskar” and “Vit” transported 46,000 passengers and 4,814 tons of cargo between Bulgarian Danube ports, generating gross revenue of 4,320,887 leva. This provided grounds for putting into operation the converted tugboat “Osam” and three self-propelled barges for cargo transport: “Veliko Tarnovo”, “Lom” and “Maritsa”.
