Field notes
How a winter quay diary differs from the summer one
A summer movements book at a small British harbour is often a procession of predictable names. The same coaster on a Thursday. The trip boats on a blue afternoon. The fuel barge when the tanks look low. Winter is another document entirely, even when the berths have not changed.
We start by counting blank mornings. In January they are not a filing error. They are fog in the channel, a pilot who will not board, or a skipper who declines a berth with a north-easterly still on the wall. If those mornings are drawn as ordinary idle time, a committee will think the quay is underused. It is waiting on weather.
The second pass is the Saturday. Summer Saturdays at a mixed harbour can look busy because leisure boats and a single cargo call overlap. Winter Saturdays often show a long empty stretch after the fishing boats have landed. That emptiness is useful. It is a window for maintenance, for a dredger, or for a lay-by that would be politically difficult in August.
Third, we mark delays that sit against named causes in the book: ‘awaiting tug’, ‘lock on stop’, ‘ice on ladders’. Those phrases are local. They should survive into the chart labels. Replacing them with a generic ‘operational delay’ is how a harbour loses the argument with its own memory.
When we are asked to compare a winter and a summer at the same quay, we refuse to average them into one occupancy figure. Two seasons, two pages. The harbour master already knows they feel different. The charts should admit it.