Observing the ever-changing Falmouth port scene from the Castle Drive lay-by above, you might be intrigued not least by the delicate business of drydocking a vessel.
Laying her to rest on the blocks below is an inch-perfect exercise requiring much careful calculation, planning and execution.
I’ve no idea how it stands today, but I can recall that for much of the second half of the last century, at least, Falmouth had a particularly good reputation as an accident-free port in terms of shipping movements.
That little snippet emerged during my interview in 1988 with Alan Ahrens, who was clocking up 25 years as the man in charge of drydocking operations in the port.
There are exceptions to every “rule,” of course, and he would never forget two of them – first when only good fortune prevented “an international incident” and then when a ship was towed out of dock expressly against his wishes.
In the late 1960s, he told me, a Russian trawler with nets tangled around its propeller needed to go into the old No 1 dry dock (now Pendennis Shipyard) at a time when a big NATO operation was under way in the area.
Alan, in line with duty, had to go on board to study the plans of the vessel prior to her docking.
But the 6ft 6in captain was not best pleased about having to drydock and would not produce the plans.
“Captain, we must see your plans so that we can fit you in properly,” Alan explained.
The response was not the plans, but a glass of vodka, placed in Alan’s hand. “Thank you,” he said. “Now, please, the plans.” Another vodka . . . followed by several more as the sequence repeated itself.
The captain finally stipulated: “You drink, or no plans.” So eventually Alan got his plans and, as he put it, “floated” off the ship and went home for the night.
The next morning, in accordance with those plans, he supervised the laying of the blocks on the dry dock bottom to “cradle” the trawler.
Once the vessel was home and dry, he personally went down to the bottom of the dock. There he was amazed to discover two objects hanging from either side of the vessel’s bottom; they were 14 feet long, a foot wide, ten inches deep, and definitely not shown on the plans.
“They must have been some sort of listening devices,” said Alan. “Whatever they were, they were just missing the cradle blocks. If they had landed on top of those blocks, the devices would have gone right up through the ship and we would have had an international incident!”
That was the nearest Alan had come to a calamity during the quarter-century and counting in his drydock role.
But there was also the time when the owners of a Norwegian tanker were anxious for her to sail from the Queen Elizabeth Dry Dock, despite an easterly gale – “the worst wind we can have for this manoeuvre.”
Men had worked round the clock to get her ready on time and Alan recalled: “I warned that it was not entirely safe for her to come out, but the captain insisted.”
The bow tug was secured to the vessel before she began moving out of the dock – to avoid that exercise being undertaken in the Docks basin – and the tanker sailed safely and punctually.
Alan breathed a big sigh of relief – the more so when, from reports coming in from other locations, he learnt that this had been one of only a handful of shipping movements to go ahead in the whole of the UK on that stormy day.
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