Our senior shipwright started here as an apprentice in 1996. He has taught nine of the twelve men now on the floor.
There is a particular kind of knowledge that does not survive being written down. Not because it is secret, but because it is held in the hands and the eye: how far a piece of timber will move before it complains, how a scarf should feel when it is right, when a surface is fair and when it merely looks fair under this light, at this angle, at this time of day.
A yard either has that knowledge on the floor or it does not. It cannot be bought in at short notice, and it cannot be recovered quickly once it is gone. Everything about how we hire and how we train follows from that one fact.
Why the transfer takes years
A carpentry apprentice can be taught to use every machine in the shop in a few weeks. What takes years is judgement: the ability to look at a job and know which of several correct methods is the right one here, on this vessel, with this timber, given what happens next. That judgement is built by being wrong under supervision, repeatedly, on work that will be checked before it goes aboard.
This is why our apprentices spend three years before they sign off their own work, and why that is not negotiable. It is not a probation period. It is the length of time it takes to accumulate enough corrected mistakes to have an instinct worth trusting.
You cannot hire an eye. You can only grow one, and it takes about three years before it is worth trusting alone.
What a long bench actually produces
A tradesman who has been on the same floor for three decades brings something a CV cannot describe: continuity of standard. The finish he accepts today is the finish he accepted twenty years ago, which means the vessels that leave this yard are comparable to one another. That consistency is invisible when it is present and extremely obvious when it is not.
It also produces a specific commercial benefit. Long-tenured trades are much faster at the diagnostic half of the job — the part where somebody has to look at an unfamiliar structure and decide what is actually wrong. Speed there is worth more than speed with a tool, because it is the part of the work that determines how much of the rest is necessary.
The obligation that comes with it
Depending on individuals is a risk as well as an asset, and the only responsible way to hold it is to spread it. Every senior tradesman here carries a teaching load. It is part of the job rather than a favour, and it is the reason a floor of twelve can trace most of its method back to a handful of people.
It is also why we keep the trades in house rather than subcontracting them out. A subcontracted trade delivers the work. It does not deliver the next generation of people who know how to do the work, and a yard that stops producing those has a finite life whether or not the order book says so.
Written at the yard in Tuzla. Figures quoted are the ones we record on the job and hand over with the vessel.