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One of the joys of maritime movie-making is the extraordinary people you get to meet and film, at all levels – from deckhand to industry leader. In the latter group, please meet Kathryn Neilson (picture), Director of the Merchant Navy Training Board (an organization that has wisely avoided the expensive attentions of image maker consultancies , who’d no doubt rebrand it something like TrainBo or MerchTr. Plus wacky logo.) We first worked with her when she was at Royal Caribbean, for a film about young people in the maritime. At which point she was a senior executive for this major company, with tasks she carried off with gallant ease, also finding time to care for her family. Wow. Now she gives us a task: short socials for MNTB, to encourage young people to think about a maritime career. 1’30 max. Challenge.

Anyway, after filming what the RN allowed with that – and witnessing the students on the Future Maritime Engineers excursion both excited and interested at the sight of their navy’s maritime assets on display in Portsmouth harbour, it was time to visit the BAE workshops in the base, to get a handle on what life is like for their trainees. Only…unannounced to us, they were taking tests that day, so we were valiantly hosted solo by BAE’s Matt Gordon (picture.) Next stop HMS ‘Prince of Wales’, for a tour of the UK’s latest warship, the Royal Navy’s £3,000,000,000 asset, ready to go (kind of.) Impressive even alongside, if not exactly the most beautiful ship the navy ever commissioned. Yours for 10 points: was I to be allowed to film this PR opportunity for the RN? Yes/No. (See answer at * below.)

* – No.

That bold recruiting call by the Royal Navy clearly didn’t apply to me on Future Maritime Engineers – no filming of anything RN during the FME harbour tour. (The students had a blast driving the tender, though). Evidently my shots would be a deadly threat to Britain’s maritime security. ???? The Royal Navy is desperately short of engineers, and the more our film might do to promote such a career would surely help. So hard-up are the RN they once launched a ‘RELIVE a Life Without Limits’ campaign, to re-recruit engineers who’d left the navy. Anyway, I had to find a solution, since I couldn’t film the whole point of the harbour tour, i.e. RN in being – had to have that. To see what I did, go https://www.maritimefilmsuk.tv/films/the-wellington-trust-future-maritime-engineers/ and at 05.19 look very quickly at the bottom left of the screen…

Day 3 of the Future Maritime Engineers project, and Rebecca Swan of the Wellington Trust had fixed up a great programme of visits to HM Dockyard Portsmouth, starting with a harbour trip on board a SERCO tender (the RN outsources a lot of its inshore work to this excellent service company.) Of course I wanted to film that too for the project movie – and so I asked, early in the project, could I go on board the tender, please. Reluctant yes. BUT I was not to film any RN ships, personnel or dockyard facilities – what the students were keen to see, like thousands of visitors to Portsmouth harbour every year. I could only film towards Gosport – some yachts and a tanker. No warships. So I had to get the students had to look where they didn’t want to. Terrific.

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.)

The tank at Warsash Maritime College revealed itself to the Future Maritime Engineers team as a very long and narrow swiming pool with a gantry suspended across it, where master of ceremonies xxx xxx took charge ,- King Neptune right in the heart of the Academy. He it was who had the waves (if not the wind down in that tank space) under his command, to do his bidding. And his bidding was to send waves of increasing height down along the tank, testing FME’s paper boats to their limits, among much hilarity from the young naval architects who had cast their bread over such troubled waters. From his bridge over that inland sea, Professor Garfunkel aka Jonathan Ridley watched their progress Or lack of it. Anyway the point was well made, increasing still further the FME Trip Advisor rating!