Dracone Barge

A Dracone Barge is a large flexible watertight tube intended to carry a liquid cargo while towed mostly-submerged behind a ship. One large current example of the type has a capacity of 935 cubic metres (4.23m diameter, 91m long) while weighing only 6.5 tonnes empty.

The Dracone Barge was invented in 1956 by Professor William Hawthorne as a new type of oil tanker. The intent was to create an improved transport technology: the long tube can be pulled by a lower powered vessel than the equivalent tanker, the cargo can be handed off at the destination very quickly, and incurs no drag cost when empty (because it can easily be taken aboard), as compared to the similar unladen to laden drag of the rigid-hulled tanker of equivalent capacity.

The common modern use (patented by BP in 1976) is in the clean-up of petroleum spills or pollution slicks, where any small and manouevrable vessel (e.g. a harbour tug) with pumping gear mounted on it can gather up a much larger volume of liquid than it can carry by pumping it promptly back over the side into a Dracone Barge. A secondary, but related use, is the offloading of bilgewater from large ships that must be treated (at a shore-side facility) and not dumped directly into the sea. Another, somewhat unusual, use by the U.S. Navy, is the use of strings of air-inflated barges to form an on-the-water barrier at a considerable distance around valuable ships docked or anchored near to shore. Dracone barges are still used for their nominal purpose in some cases, where ship-to-shore transport needs to be achieved in a place without a deep water dock.

The vessels were given the name "dracone" as it was "the nearest word in Greek for a mythical monster such as a sea serpent." However, one year earlier Frank Herbert wrote his first novel The Dragon in the Sea about submarines towing large bags to carry oil, and other sources say the naming was an "overt acknowledgment of the source of his idea".