Last week, Ocius held the christening of BlueBottle ‘Bonnie’ by Susie Dane at the company's upgraded facilities at UNSW.
The formal ceremony was followed by a stirring rendition of “My Bonnie lies over the ocean’ and a quiet celebration.
Bonnie is the second of Ocius' Beth class next-gen 22’ Bluebottles and is 3’ longer than Bluebottles Bruce and Bob.
Under the laws of physics for boats, this extra 3’ gives Beth and Bonnie twice the power, payload, performance and winch size than Bruce and Bob, while still enabling transport by an RTA registered trailer and launch and recovery (LARS) from a conventional boat ramp by two people.
In 2021, Bob will be deployed to Perth for tests off Rottnest Island and 22’ Beth will be joined in Darwin by Bonnie and three more 22’ Bluebottles to demonstrate the potential capability of an intelligent network of persistent USVs armed with Thales thin line sonar arrays, radars, cameras and other sensors.
The 22' Bluebottles use Solar Composite Structures crafted by SA-based Praxis Aeronautics, a start-up headed by siblings Cameron and Katie Donaldson.
Civilian applications for the boats include marine and weather monitoring in hard-to-reach areas, GPS mapping or hydrocarbon monitoring. Charles Darwin University is involved with Ocius in a climate and oceanography project.