Working at The Nautical College Fleetwood

Having already written a whole string of articles on my final job before retiring, I should go back, if not to the very beginning, then to the start of my time in the Post-16 Education Sector. I had already spent a year and a half working in the District Education Offices in Blackpool when I was seconded to the Nautical College at Fleetwood to act as Deputy Registrar and Finance Officer. This was in September 1985.

Not that the work entailed a lot of this, but it's a bit more interesting than photos of an office... The college was fairly small as Further Education colleges go. There were just two academic departments: Maritime Studies and Marine Electronics. One dealt with basic seaman skills all the way up to a Masters certificate - i.e. becoming qualified as a Captain. It included navigation, ropework, sailing and all the other skills necessary to keep a ship safe at sea or on any body of water including rivers and canals. Marine Electronics dealt with radio procedure and maintenance, radar and probably lots of other stuff I didn't get to know about.

There was a huge simulator of a ship's bridge where students had to navigate into and out of harbours, with or without visuals on screens before them. Without screens simulated sailing in fog... Down on Fleetwood Beach was a weird little building - currently at time of writing up for sale I gather - raised on stilts and full of working radar monitors. (I'm not at all sure they are still inside!)

In addition, at the mouth of the River Wyre was this small platform where students either already or wishing to work in the Offshore platform industry could undergo training on safety procedures, a certificate on which was a requirement to work on oil and gas rigs. New workers took a 5-day course which included a day's fire-fighting training with Lancashire Fire Brigade and existing workers had to renew their certificate periodically by taking a shorter 3-day course. The courses also included a simulation where a mock helicopter fuselage was plunged underwater, rolled over and then they had to escape - literally.

There were a number of different lifeboats and fast rescue craft. FOSC-5 (the fifth boat on the platform run by the Fleetwood Offshore Survival Centre) was a jet-engined rigid hull with a rather satisfying roar and a certain amount of WHUMFF once in the water!

It cut a dash and when on manouvres particularly during the summer holiday season it invariably drew a crowd of onlookers.

There were also some rather more basic craft. Here a fully enclosed lifeboat (you don't want to be in an open one if a rig is on fire...) is the subject of an exercise with FOSC-5 standing by in case it is needed.

The college also had this small ship. The Lancastrian was built originally as a yacht for a millionaire. It turned out to be a bit top heavy for him and rolled about quite a bit much to the discomfort of students and any visiting dignitaries who might be given a "treat" ride on her. She is shown out of the water having had stabilisers fitted. Made no difference really...

This is what the other 99.99% of my job entailed. However I did find a room full of unused Commodore Pet computers each with a fabulously luxurious 32K - yes K not MB, not GB - of memory and I wrote a piece of financial software on one which saved the data onto cassette tape and which led to the college buying a larger machine (125K whoopee!) and my career in computerised Management Information Systems got started.

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