Northstar Workboats

Northstar runs a five-vessel workboat fleet out of Esbjerg, doing crew transfers, light salvage and short tow work across the southern North Sea. Like every workboat operator, their margin lives and dies on utilisation: the boats are profitable when they're moving and quietly burning insurance and crew wages when they're not.

Before Vessel4you, idle legs were treated as a fact of life. A boat returning from a contract in Aberdeen would simply steam home empty because the office didn't have time to chase a one-off back-haul on the phone. Erik estimates each vessel was sitting on twelve dead days a month — five vessels, sixty days of paid-for capacity going nowhere.

In the first month on the backload board they published nine return legs and filled three of them — a small fertiliser tow back to Esbjerg, a buoy-recovery favour for a neighbouring operator, and a short crew shuttle for an offshore wind installer. Idle days per vessel dropped from twelve to four, and the captains now publish their own return legs from the bridge before they've even finished offloading.