As my father often told me, you say “bends and hitches”, not knots. Or anyway that’s the way it was in his pre- and post-war RN. The students on the Wellington Trust’s Future Maritime Engineers project were acquainted with the knotty problems a life at sea can bring by learning how to rig an overside cradle in a special training suite at Solent University. It soon became clear that your life might depend on getting your rope handling right – especially if you were, say, hanging overside from the mighty height of a discharged bulk carrier in order to do a bit of scraping and painting – one of the less lovely aspects of sea life. Also addressed were other aspects of the sometimes magical-seeming art of dealing with your bends and making sure there were no hitches (of the wrong kind.)
BENDS AND HITCHES
16 February 2024
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About Rob
Rob is a TV producer, reporter and camera operator with 30 years of experience at the BBC, Channel 4 and ITN, in news, factual and documentary production. He is a four-time award winner, whose awards include a coveted Royal Television Society award for his work on Channel 4 News. His association with the Maritime Foundation goes back to 1995 when he won the first Desmond Wettern Maritime Media Award for a series of reports that led to a major documentary on the loss of the bulk carrier Derbyshire.