The flotilla backing the future of Falmouth Docks

Shortly after dawn last Friday, while most of the town was still waking up, a line of workboats, tugs and commercial vessels formed up on the water and did something you don’t often see off Falmouth: they staged a parade.

It was early on the morning of Friday 11 September when a flotilla of local marine stakeholders, businesses, workboats and commercial vessels took part in a ‘parade of sail’ through the harbour. The event was organised to show support for the development of Falmouth Docks, and afterwards several of those involved, coordinated through the Cornwall Marine Network, put their names to a joint statement setting out why.

A port that has changed hands six times in a century

The statement leans on the port’s own history to make its case. Falmouth, it says, was founded around its port in the first place, and over the last hundred years the docks themselves have passed between six different custodians.

📷Credit: Cornwall Marine Network

What the group says the port needs next

Whatever the next hundred years hold for Falmouth Docks, the signatories say the site needs three things in place.

• Strong wharfs: modern, concrete wharfs able to support large cranes and the heavy marine plant and renewables of the future.
• Deep water berths: for the ships that will service all our lives, in both peacetime and wartime.
• Adaptable infrastructure: modern and adaptable power, cargo handling, storage, workshops and laydown areas.

A call to work together

The statement’s final ask is for everyone involved to work together, conforming to environmental best practice, so that a modern, competitive port is left behind for whoever comes next.

Six custodians in a hundred years. Whoever holds Falmouth Docks for the next hundred will decide what that seventh chapter looks like.

📷Credit: Cornwall Marine Network