Gangplank

I don't often come to Alexandria Basin in the middle of a working Monday, and I knew it would be busy, as it indeed was, full of lumbering trucks and the whine of big dockside cranes. I put on the hi-vis vest and wellies and walked over to this gigantic Panamanian bulk cargo ship, over 40,000 tons of animal feed as I learned later. The air was rich with the old socks smell, like silage. I shot a few frames then decided it might actually be safer if I parked near the vessel, as a car is easier to spot than a person, hi-vis vest or not. A car pulled in next to mine and a guy rolled down his window to ask if I was the tax man. Turned out Thomas (or Thos) was a cargo inspector, with plenty of camera gear himself (though it was mainly for photographing golfers, a business his brother had set up). He had a Canon 1D with an enormous telephoto, among other bits of pro kit. Lovely chatting to him. He might have been around my age and said one drawback of the cargo inspecting was having to climb gangplanks like the one above, about as high as a six or seven storey building.