The aspiring ship-to-ship stevedore will have to also acquire a few small handling craft for fendering the ships and a barrier several hundred metres long for the purpose of containing any little accidents. There is even a code of conduct published by the oil industry setting up standards. This last piece of kit is a bit of a giveaway as to where the dangers of this kind of operation lies.While aspiring ship-to-ship stevedores should give all due consideration to avoiding collisions and prangs with other ships, the truth is that all manner of errors can lead to minor splashes of oil pollution.

Ask anyone in a P&I club to list his or her recollections of minor spills and they will probably recall the opening of wrong valves, the failure of pumps or the puncturing or fracture of hoses and lines. A dozen or so tons of oil can be surprisingly incendiary in the minds of the bystanders and the general public.

This may help to explain why some of the existing operators like to perform their work in waters outside the 12 mile mark, far from ports, said waters preferably to contain a fast moving current exiting the estuary concerned.

It may also explain why outside the Arabian Gulf and the Black Sea, the profession of ship-to-ship stevedore is rarely encountered in the marine centres of this world, even by tired underwriting hacks like your correspondent who has been known to profess he thought he had seen everything there was to see on the waterfront.