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.

Work Index

Bank Holiday In Fleetwood

Bank Holiday Monday, 30 May 2016. We had gone south of Blackpool to St Annes on the Sunday so today we head north and come to Fleetwood.

We head for a sunny Fleetwood to walk down from the boating lake to the ferry and back. For a change I decided to fit my telephoto lens to the camera and see what I could find to photograph with it. This is Fleetwood Mount, seen over the putting greens.

There's a model boating pond and a second boating lake where dingy sailing used to be taught. When I worked at the Nautical College in 1985-6 they used to use this lake and had an enclosed lifeboat on davits and a couple of large lifeboats on the water, which are still there. I've not seen them in use for a long time, so am not sure if they are still owned by the college or not.

As we got down onto the seafront near the "Lower" lighthouse, one of the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company's craft was speeding past Wyre Light out in the bay. The telephoto was at 300mm for this and there's quite a bit of heat haze messing up the image I'm afraid. Heat haze off the north west coast - who'd have thought...?

I've pulled back the zoom a bit on this one but even so, if you make out the tiny figures of fishermen on the first spit of land then you'll get an idea of just how far out Wyre Light is.

Dandelions are taking over the beach! They are intent on taking over my lawn too, come to think of it...

Another full zoom, looking across the broad expanse of the estuary and Pilling Sands to Heysham Power Station. The tide recedes two and a half miles here and comes in faster than you can run. The sandbanks are riddled with gullies that fill up even faster as the tide approaches and these can cut you off from land very quickly. Given that there can be over ten metres (32.5 feet) difference between low tide and high tide you can see why Morecambe Bay is one of the UK's most dangerous places to decide to amble out for a stroll...

Knott End ferry landing across the River Wyre. That sandbank is the reason that even when it is covered and looks to be just river, the ferries do a dog-leg manoeuvre to get to the landing!

Flowers. Don't ask, I don't know. They just looked nice! If I was pressed all I could offer would be: pink flowers...

Between the gardens and buildings of the Marine Park and the site where Fleetwood's pier used to be, a path leads down to follow the seafront which heads off at right angles as the River Wyre channel also bends to head out to sea. From the path we get another glimpse of Fleetwood Mount.

Fleetwood Beach Lighthouse. Designed by Decimus Burton and Captain H. M. Denham in 1839. It is partner to the much taller Pharos Lighthouse, a little farther inland. Known locally as the "upper and lower lights", ships coming into Fleetwood up the River Wyre estuary had to keep the lights directly one above the other to know they were safely in the deep water channel.

The squat building to the left, built on stilts over the beach is - or was, I'm not sure if it is still used - a radar training facility, part of what is now the Nautical Campus of Blackpool & The Fylde College.

Having taken the beach path we are now away from road traffic and in an area much favoured by walkers, holiday makers and cyclists. A row of beach huts adds a bit of colour to the scene.

I never got into the beach hut thing. My parents when I was a child would rather sit on the deck chairs on the beach, sometimes with a wind break if it was really rough and would happily force us to eat sandwiches (such an apt name) that were gritty with sand. Well, it did me no harm. Coffee or tea came from a stall on the Promenade and the only concession to the blowing sand was a saucer placed on top of any open jugs of water or milk. The cups just filled up and we tipped them upside down before pouring into them.

A general view of the beach between the Marine Hall and Rossall Point - the weirdly-shaped building in the far distance is Rossall Point Observation Tower. Open to the public it provides a viewpoint over Morecambe Bay. It is a facility of the National Coastwatch Institution.

Pleasure flights and pilot training flights from Blackpool Airport often pass over the town. The telephoto lens picks this one out nicely. I did this myself on my 40th birthday. Of course the plane then was more like Biggles would have been used to in World War One...

Finally we complete our round trip and arrive back at the boating lake and our car.

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Messing About On The River

I've been scanning a few photos from old slides that I took in 1986

At that time I was working for Fleetwood Nautical College as its Registrar in the last year it existed as an independant college before its merger with Blackpool College at Christmas 1986.

They had (and still have) a working platform on the River Wyre at Fleetwood to train workers on oil and gas rigs in safety procedures for offshore workers.

On the platform they had some brilliant bits of kit, including this jet-powered fast rescue craft designated FOSC-5. FOSC stood for Fleetwood Offshore Survival Centre.

Offshore workers had to undergo a 5-day survival course in order to be certified to work on a rig and had to undertake a 3-day refresher every 3 years.

Not all of the equipment was as fast or glamourous as the fast rescue boat. There were enclosed lifeboats, including stranger shaped craft than this one. There was an almost circular one that pumped water from underneath and sprayed it down the sides of the craft - to cool down the sides of the thing whilst floating on a sea covered with burning oil.

Being almost circular, it bobbed about a bit! It was not a craft for those who were easily seasick!

Part of the course involved jumping off the platform into the River Wyre and clambering into an enclosed inflatable life raft - a feat that took nerves and a lot of strength to clamber into the life raft!

Another exercise involved getting into a mock-up of a helicopter cabin which was filled with smoke and then dropped underwater and inverted before the "crew" could escape.

Great fun! Happy days!

Wi've Bin Up The 'Pool

We've had a day out. First one I think since we went up to Cumbria for Fran's birthday in March. It's been a busy year!

Anyway a bit of a pilgrimage; we went to Albert Dock in Liverpool and went to see the statue of Billy Fury on the waterfront just by Albert Dock.

It's a shame so many people seem to glance at it and say "Oh, look - a statue of Elvis..." without wondering why a place with such a great musical heritage would have a statue of an American singer. The place is not without it's musical greats. Billy was certainly one of those.

Then a trog around the Albert Dock itself. There's a few empty plots but that's usual in such places - sometimes I think the only people making money these days are councils from the Council Tax and landlords from extortionate rents.

Happily there are lots of cafes there. Unhappily we chose one staffed by two teenage girls who seemed to have no idea and who didn't care that they had no idea and who had a steady stream of customers bringing food back for one reason or another. Ours was ok, but I drank the coffee down in one go as soon as it came. I was thirsty - but had I left it any longer it would have been too cold!

A nice old sailing ship in the corner of the dock, flanked by several tugs and other boats.

Despite a stint as Registrar at Fleetwood's Nautical College in 1985/86, I'm no expert on types of ships I'm afraid - although, did you know that the word starboard for the right hand side of a ship as seen from the back, is so called because the Norsemen had their tiller or steorbord on their Viking ships on that side? Hey! Full of useless information, me!