Pacific Pontoon & Pier is a wholly Australian-owned Marine Construction Company who specialise in Design and Construction of Flotation Solutions as well as Steel and Aluminium fabrication.Backed by an in house design and engineering team with support by external engineers who specialise in Marine Construction and Aluminium Fabrication.If you know the sumptuous and exclusive Palazzo Versace hotel on Queensland’s Gold Coast, you will be familiar with its private 90-berth marina. It is, as the brochures will tell you, ‘state of the art’ and designed to be easy for the clientele of the hotel and residences to moor their yachts, luxury launches and multi-hulls easily and safely.It is one of the latest examples of marina building from an expert who re-thought the whole concept. Twenty five years ago, Bill Bourke was, he readily admits, the sole employee of a company building residential pontoons and jetties at the back of houses in the canal systems along the Gold Coast. He started up with “just a nail bag and a labourer,” but he ended up taking on the major US competition and beating them.Pacific Pontoon and Pier is now probably the foremost and largest builder of marinas in Australia, having developed a product range that revolutionised marina construction, supplying a low-maintenance, high density and aesthetically pleasing marina product. Bill says he took a long hard look at how marinas were constructed at that time. The major suppliers “lacked a lot of research and development in their processes, so I sat down and re-engineered how I thought marinas should be built.” He examined the manufacturing processes and ended up designing a series of alloy extrusions and some different ways of connecting modules together, all of which he patented.Previously, he explains, marina modules and pontoons tended to be linked using timber, “which is very high- maintenance.” Bill says he is aware of yacht clubs that would spend in the region of $100,000 per year on timber maintenance alone. “When I took the timber out of marinas I took the maintenance out too.”By early this year, he had developed some 55 complete marinas and nearly 9,000 berths, most but not all in Australia some in New Zealand, New Caledonia and Fiji, some much further afield, such as a series of ferry terminals along the broad, straight Han River that runs through Korea’s capital Seoul. The latter project is a reminder that not all of Pacific Pontoon’s output is geared to the leisure market – Bill has done a lot of work along the Brisbane River, including refuelling facilities and jetties for the CityCat commuter ferries. Bill’s design enabled him to make serious inroads into the industry. “I looked at criteria of about 20 things that I wanted to change within the industry. It took me about three years to actually come up with the final designs of how it all worked. This modular approach frees us up in the design of a marina.” Pacific Pontoon does everything in-house, including design, engineering, piling, manufacturing, construction and all the installation work. In the case of the Palazzo Versace, says Bill, the developers came to him essentially with a blank sheet of paper and asked him to design the facility for them.The key is the versatility of Bill’s basic modular design, which he can manufacture locally anywhere in the world without the need to ship moulds – other types of design are very labour-intensive, he points out. His approach was more like a child’s building blocks, linking together to become a very strong structure. “It’s a concrete deck, so it’s heavy and stable, but it had to be easy to construct so I could take it to Asia and other parts of the world where you maybe don’t have such a high skill level among staff. What we manufacture can be done right and safely with the correct foreman. Our design works easily, whether it is at the Palazzo Versace or whether it is a marina for fishing trawlers. It’s the same construction and it just works, whether they are 60 tonne fishing vessels or world-class yachts.”