How to Become a Tugboat Captain: A Comprehensive Guide | 2025
A Comprehensive Guide to a Rewarding Career in Maritime Operations How to become a Tugboat Captain Becoming a tugboat captain is more than just a job; it is a journey…
PORTS, EXPLORED.
Data Power for Towage
Powerful data-driven insights to optimize towage businesses
Towage is your business
You operate under an increasingly competitive situation; margins are deteriorating while the demands to your fleet are increasing with larger cargovessel sizes. Consolidation in the market means your competitors are getting scale advantages. You're trying to run a highly efficient operation and occasionally look for opportunities to expand. LionRock Maritime can help you with both. Through cutting edge data technology we can give you immediate and unprecedented insight into towage businesses in any port in the world, including your own.
Helping you with your priorities is our business
Expand your business profitably
Are you looking for market intelligence to grow your towage business profitably? Accurate date on tug movements, on any port in the world? Start exploring here
Reduce fuel consumption
Are you also concerned, or maybe unaware, about the fuel that is wasted in your operation due to unnecessary speeding? You can do something about it today.
Increase your market share
Are you ready to wow your customers with facts on your operation versus your competitors? Read here how your peers are using data to win market share.
Data to power your business
All our services are powered by data. We have developed our software to crunch over millions of AIS signals and spot movement patterns between tugs and ships. It identifies tug jobs; that is why we internally call it “The job_scanner”. But we don’t stop there. More algorithms process the derived data and deliver insights. Insights that can power your towage business.
- Tugjobs in port, including timestamps, ship reference, operator info and terminal
- Sailing speeds, split in light- and operational sailing
- Fuel consumption, -cost and emissions of your fleet
- Operator profiling, market shares and fleet utilization
Your Benefits
Unique towage insights
Get access to our unique technology for assessing tug movements in ports. It can give you unprecedented insights into any tug operation in the world that you cannot get anywhere else.
CAPEX free
Since we use predominantly AIS data to power our insights there is no requirement to install any hardware or data collection applications on board tugs. No investment or CAPEX required
Combination of Maritime and Data Analytics expertise
We have an apt understanding of AIS data and data analytics technology, powered by strong experience in the maritime sector.
Easy and flexible contracting
There is no upfront investment cost for achieving value from our products, so we can also offer a very flexible and easy contracting set-up, not requiring long-term commitments.
One stop shop service
We offer both stand-alone data powered insights and can also help you with the implementation and value generation
Our Impact in Numbers
50+
Ports Explored
€ 1.200.000+
Worldwide Annual Cost Savings
KG 5.500.000+
KGs of CO2 Saved
Case study Client
Sailing speed optimization resulting in € 190,000 saved in costs annually.
A large regional harbor and terminal towage operator was looking for a method to save fuel without investing in technology upgrades. They had already installed fuel consumption meters on board a substantial amount of their tugs and were monitoring the fuel consumption closely. Yet they could not see the reductions they were hoping to achieve.
Reporting on the sailing speeds of their fleet while mobilizing and demobilizing showed that there was significant potential to reduce fuel consumption by reducing speeds. While they knew that for many of their tugs the optimal speed was below 8 knots, the speed reports LionRock Maritime provided showed that there was excessive speeding over 8 knots, even up to 60% of all light sailing.
Despite this finding, the client was hesitant to implement LionRock’s “Waste Free Shipping” solution. How could simple performance feedback on speeding add any value in the drive to lower fuel use?
We hence started small with the implementation in one of their operations. It involved a water system that incorporated 3 ports where our client has 6 tugs in operation. The baseline speed measurement showed that speeding in excess of 8 knots was done around 60% of all free sailing time. The implementation involved weekly speed performance reporting on a captain level. Within 2 months, speeding went down from 60% on average to less than 20%. Representing an annual saving of about EUR 250.000,-
Following this success, the client chose to implement LionRock’s Waste Free Shipping solution in 6 more ports.
-80%
Reduction in Excessive Speeding
€ 190.000+
Annual Cost Saving
KG 1.500.000+
KGs CO2 Saved
Our Customers
“The results exceeded our expectations. The good thing about LionRock’s product is that it does not require any investment in hardware, nor a lot of management time. It is simple, fast, has saved us significant costs and reduced our emissions.” - Walter Collet, Managing Director at Fairplay Towage
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