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Updates from Maritime Film UK’s Rob White, TV producer, reporter and camera operator with 30 years’ experience at the BBC, Channel 4 and ITN

BENDS AND HITCHES

16 February 2024

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.)

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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.

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