When I was thinking about leaving the deep-sea life, I thought about becoming a pilot. This was not as easy as it might appear, as vacancies seemed few and far between and newcomers had to spend an awful long time learning the trade and earning no money while doing it, in most pilotage districts with which I was familiar.

A couple of factors put me off. It seemed to me that all the pilots I knew seemed to spend half their lives in trains. But more importantly, I genuinely wondered about whether I could hack the job. Did I have the spatial awareness? The sixth sense-like ability to tell if the tide has cut in early when coming off the berth, and realising before anyone else that the helmsman, who speaks no known language, has put the wheel the wrong way?

I found something else to do with my life, and pilotage probably had a narrow escape.

You might think that salvors, when they get together, rather like farmers on market day, complain rather a lot.

Awards aren’t what they used to be, with zealous lawyers and mean-minded salvage arbitrators taking the bread from the mouths of their children.

The P&I Clubs seem to regard them as thieves and practitioners of extortion, instead of skilled operators who routinely save sizeable investments in property, not to mention all that oil which might otherwise be lapping on somebody’s beach.

If I were an Australian mining magnate and rich beyond all avarice, with a penchant for replica antiques, what would I buy?

There have been some startling pictures published – we used to call them “artists’ impressions” – of the replica of the ‘Titanic’ that Clive Palmer is having built in China’s Jinling Shipyard and is apparently due to make her maiden trans-Atlantic voyage in 2016.

Unlike most merchant mariners these days, I spent all my years at sea under the Red Ensign, with the port of London inscribed across the cruiser stern of all the ships I sailed in.

Such a claim would be most unusual amongst today’s mariners, some of whom would require access to a very large atlas, or unusual skills in geography, in order to identify their port of registry.

I don’t want to appear arrogant, but marine professionals are expected to be accurate in the practice oftheir profession.

Our professional examinations reflect this, with extraordinarily high pass marks in subjects like navigation, stability or chart work, and similar precision required in engineering examinations. Goodness, you can hesitate a bit in your answer in an oral examination and a liverish examiner can send you straight back to sea.

Absolute accuracy matters, we were always told, because imprecision could wreck ships and cost lives. And it is the same today as it always was – perhaps more so, as there are fewer people around to pick up your errors.