º£½ÇÊÓƵ

Born into a maritime family with great heritage on the Humber, Camilla Carlbom Flinn’s rise to prominence in the sector came at a time of incredible transformation.

For while the energy transition has played out from the corridors of power to homes and industry, no clearer a picture has emerged than on the Energy Estuary itself.

Immingham Dock, built principally to export coal, was walked across during its construction by her great grandfather as excavations completed on the 45-acre enclosure back in 1912, ahead of his eponymous ship's agency handling the very first vessel to enter the lock. Less than a century later the port was being repurposed to import the fossil fuel at scale, as power stations needed coal to keep the country’s lights on, while mines of Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire closed. As the nation was weaned off the black stuff, renewables brought evolution across both banks.

Carlbom Shipping - now Pentagon Marine, following its acquisition in 2022 - fulfils a critical role for those vessels chartered to help build the world’s leading wind farms, and has recently added the world’s largest jack-up vessel to a proud list.

Instrumental to that change has been Camilla. Born in Cleethorpes, school holidays were punctuated with regular visits to the Immingham office, before she headed off to study international business management and broadcast journalism. An early media career took her to Paris, London and New York before returning to Lincolnshire with her young family in 2008. Her father Anthony’s sudden passing saw her take the helm of Carlbom Shipping as a new industry dawned, a move that was always in the making, but happened without warning.

“I was always involved in the business from my teenage years, I’d always been around the office, I’d met clients and accompanied my father to business lunches and dinners,” she said. “Before I even came back to the Humber, I knew the team in the office very well, and quite a lot of the clients, but I only came back 17 years ago when my father passed away.”

Carlbom had been founded in 1897 in Grimsby, expanding to Hull and then Immingham when the port was created. A proud history with enviable achievements throughout, Camilla said: “We handled the very first vessel to enter Immingham Dock, the SS Max, and it is wonderful that we are still here, alongside some of the same family companies still working on the river. That’s the lifeblood, the small, long-established companies with wonderful relations on the Humber. We have all grown in different ways. It is the basis of the maritime network that has also become the renewables network on the Humber.”

Those first tentative steps into offshore wind have blossomed, and under Pentagon the business is now working from Aberdeen to Lowestoft, and thriving on the Humber, where so much has played out. “We’ve been very much involved in the construction of all the major wind farms off the East Coast in the last decade, so too operations and maintenance in Grimsby.