Multraship Brand Guidelines: Terneuzen Tugs, the Carrousel Rave Tug & a Salvage Family

A towage and salvage family on the Western Scheldt.

Multraship is the towage and salvage business of the Muller Maritime Group, based at Terneuzen on the Western Scheldt in the Netherlands. The company says the Muller family has been in shipping for more than two centuries and has specialised in towage and salvage since 1911, and that the fourth generation of the family now runs the business, with the fifth generation joining it. In 2018 gCaptain described the Muller Maritime Group as active in all types of towing for more than 100 years. Its managing director is Captain Leendert Muller, DredgeWire reported in 2024.

The sources used for this guide do not say how the company’s predecessors operated during the occupation of 1940–1945.

Today the company says it runs harbour and terminal towage, sea towage, salvage, offshore services and port services from its head office in Terneuzen, with branch offices in Rotterdam, Bulgaria and Romania. It describes a fleet of tugs, self-propelled floating sheerlegs and diving support vessels working in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and sea towage of seagoing vessels, dredging and offshore equipment, heavy-lift barges, floating cranes and dry docks.

Around that core sits a cluster of smaller firms, the company says. Verenigde Bootlieden has supplied boatmen in the port of Terneuzen for more than a century; Montis Mooring has handled mooring work at the locks there since 1996; Polderman, at Hansweert, tows and salvages across the Eastern and Western Scheldt; and Scheldt Maritime Services plans tug work for Terneuzen, Vlissingen, Ghent, Antwerp and, since 2022, Rotterdam. Joint ventures include Antwerp Towage, with Fairplay, on the river terminals and locks of the port of Antwerp, and C-TOW, with DEME and Herbosch-Kiere, for dedicated maritime terminals.

A towing point on a rotating ring.

Multraship’s most distinctive engineering idea is the Carrousel towing system, developed by its sister company Novatug, which the company describes as the innovation and research arm of the Muller Maritime Group. The system places the towing point on a freely rotating steel ring, the company says. The first tug to carry it was Multratug 12, according to gCaptain.

The idea grew into the Carrousel Rave Tug. In February 2018 the first of the type, Multratug 32, was delivered to Novatug for Multraship to operate, gCaptain reported. It combined the Carrousel system with the RAVE tug concept developed by Robert Allan Ltd. and Voith, with Voith Schneider propellers set in line on the hull’s centreline, and with a special winch made with Machinefabriek Luyt. Its hull and main steel parts were fabricated by Theodor Buschmann in Hamburg and the tug was finished at Damen’s Maaskant yard at Stellendam. Damen said in November 2018 that two such tugs had been delivered, in February and May that year, and that Multraship and Novatug had won the Maritime KVNR Shipping Award 2018 for the design.

Much of the rest of the fleet comes from Damen and carries the Multratug name with a number. On 30 May 2024 Multraship named Multratug 35, a 32-metre Damen ASD Tug 3212, at its home port of Terneuzen, DredgeWire reported; it was one of three Damen tugs built in Vietnam, with Multratug 34, already in service in Oman, and Multratug 36, then sailing to the Netherlands on her own keel. Multratug 35 and 36 were built for deep-sea and coastal towage, salvage and offshore work.

The salvage side has its own names. In October 2015, after the Dutch freighter Flinterstar sank following a collision off Zeebrugge, its owner Flinter contracted SMIT and Multraship to pump the remaining oil from the wreck, gCaptain reported, and the vessels Cormorant and Multrasalvor 3 were on scene.

Design and documentation.

Towage, salvage and dredging firms present themselves first through their ships. A tug, a salvage vessel or a dredger is the most visible thing such a company owns, and the hull, the superstructure and the funnel carry much of the identity: reds, oranges and yellows, deep navies and blacks, painted to be read at a distance across a working harbour. Funnel marks are an old shorthand. In Rotterdam, Dutch Wikipedia notes, Smit’s ocean tugs once wore a blue band on a black funnel and its harbour tugs a red one, until a single emblem of two yellow chain links on light blue replaced both in 1971.

Names do similar work. A vessel name on the bow identifies a ship and its owner, and naming rules can be traced in the record: Smit named its early ocean tugs after seas before switching to the prefix “Smit,” and Svitzer’s tugs carry the company name first, as with Svitzer Barrington. For a designer, the bow is a lettering problem with a fixed format, repeated across hundreds of hulls.

Behind the ships sits a printed and online register. Fleet lists and specification sheets give each vessel’s length, beam, draught and bollard pull in a consistent grid; project pages describe port works, land reclamation, wreck removal and offshore wind installations with dates, places and the vessels used; and annual and sustainability reports set out ownership, fleets and results year by year.

The guides in this group read each firm through that record: founding, ownership changes, named vessels and dated projects, taken from encyclopaedias, company pages and trade press. Each pairs the history with an unofficial palette and a Google Fonts stand-in; no logo, funnel mark or livery is reproduced.

Coastguard work, big projects and an award.

Multraship also works for the Dutch state. It already supplied three emergency response and towing vessels to Rijkswaterstaat’s Rijksrederij, the government agency for vessel fleets, when in November 2025 it won a long-term contract for another ship, DredgeWire reported: a 50-metre fast crew supply vessel named Enforcer, built by Damen to its FCS 5009 design, to be owned, crewed and maintained by Multraship and operated by the Netherlands Coastguard from mid-2026. Multraship’s website carries a statement from the Netherlands Coastguard on the emergency tugs the company crews for it, among them Multraship Commander.

The company’s project pages lean towards large infrastructure. It lists sea towage for the Scheldt tunnel of Antwerp’s Oosterweel Link and of the vessel MV Astoria, and its account of its 2026 award names work for the Princess Elisabeth Energy Island in the North Sea and the Fehmarnbelt tunnel between Denmark and Germany. On 21 May 2026 Multraship said it had been named Tug Owner of the Year 2026 at the International Tug & Salvage Awards, presented at the convention held in Gothenburg that month.

For a design guide, Multraship shows how a family towage firm builds recognition through vessel names: Multratug and a number for the tugs, Multrasalvor for salvage work, and the company name on emergency tugs such as Multraship Commander, with Carrousel as the name of its own towing system. Compare Damen, which built much of its fleet, and SMIT, its partner on the Flinterstar oil removal. For this guide we use a North Sea navy, a Scheldt blue, a tug orange and an estuary grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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