Unalaska, AK – A floating dry dock brought into Dutch Harbor Sunday will make it easier to repair Bering Sea fishing boats without a trip to Seattle.

The new 200-by-64-foot unit arrived at Magone Marine Service last night. Owner Dan Magone said its 45-foot-beam capacity should accommodate a good cross-section of Dutch Harbor's marine traffic.

"[The dry dock] will pick any of the old crabbers," he said. "It'll handle any of my vessels, it'll handle quite a few of the longline fleet."

The new facility can service vessels up to 1,000 tons. That's more than twice the capacity of the only other dry dock in town, the historic submarine dock now owned by Harbor Crown Seafoods, which Magone rebuilt in 1982 but no longer operates. At the moment, his shop does most of its repair work in the water, with divers.

Magone bought the new dry dock from the Foss shipyard in Seattle. The purchase price and travel costs ran him nearly $1 million, but he said it was worth it.

"Now we can pick stuff out of the water and fix it like they do in the real world," he said. "And in my old age, I'm looking forward to being able to stand out there and point, rather than go down there in a hardhat and figure out how I'm going to pull the rabbit out of the hat one more time."