How do I become … a harbourmaster

You’re advised to decide on this career early, in order to gain the required experience – but with a dearth of young seafarers perhaps the criteria will change

Mark Sansom’s outlook on life changed at the age of 10 when his parents left the Home Counties to run a hotel on top of a 300-foot cliff in Tintagel, Cornwall. From its windows, where he could watch storms whip up the Atlantic, he conceived a passion for the sea which decided his career path. “My earliest memories of the ocean are spending a lot of time underneath it when I fell off my surfboard,” he says. “I used to watch the ships going past and knew I wanted to be on them one day.”

Now, as harbourmaster at Falmouth, Sansom oversees the ships that so beguiled him as they enter and leave the port. Their safety is his main responsibility and, during the recent storms, he has ensured a safe haven in Falmouth’s sheltered waters for vessels unable to reach the battered port of Milford Haven. “The job involves a high level of routine work, but things can go wrong and wrench you out of it,” he says. “Recently, we had to admit a fishing vessel that was ablaze and presented serious safety challenges.”

Sansom’s odyssey to the post began at the age of 16 when he left school and enrolled as a deck cadet with the Royal Fleet Auxillery. This launched him into the dangers and thrills of seafaring. “My first trip was to the Bay of Biscay where we encountered a 70-foot swell,” he says. “It was completely outside anything you could prepare yourself for, but because the rest of the crew seemed pretty confident I was less alarmed than I might be now, and concentrated on the logistics of getting round a ship that was listing at 45 degrees.”

During his three-and-a-half-year cadetship Sansom, now 53, was schooled in navigation, bridge-watching, ship maintenance and the legal requirements of entering ports – skills which equipped him for his current role. “At sea you have to learn resourcefulness, which is a good education in its own right,” he says. “You’re not protected by an elite officer corps – the ship’s crew came from all sorts of background and nationalities and everyone had to work together to cope with what the ocean might throw at us, and even as a junior officer you have to learn to make snap decisions yourself rather than deferring them upwards.”

At the end of his training Sansom was promoted to third officer and embarked on three years of globe-trotting. “We went everywhere the navy went and were fully at liberty to go and explore when we arrived in different ports. We supported the Royal Yacht Britannia during the Commonwealth Games tour in 1982 and when a gun was fired by a marksman at precisely 9am when the Queen awoke that would be our signal to start refuelling the yacht.”

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