At first, the sight of grown men fiercely concentrating on the slightest movements of tiny, model ships looks a little silly.
But these experienced sea captains are actually doing serious, potentially life-saving work.
Seasoned captains and port pilots from across the globe come to this training centre on a remote Polish lake to sharpen their already considerable navigation skills.
At the centre, they manoeuvre miniature ships through courses simulating the Suez and Panama canals, and other tricky global ports.
“When you come here on the first day you think ‘Oh, it looks a bit weird’,” said captain Francois Levesque, a pilot on Canada’s Saint Lawrence river, a major shipping route that connects the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean.
“But,” Mr Levesque noted, “as the week goes on you become quite happy with your training.”
Fellow Canadian Mario Gagnon said the Saint Lawrence, with its abrupt turns and rough, sometimes icy waters is “quite a tricky place to pilot.”
This Polish lake might not be as tough, but the training is both helpful and mandatory.
A 2003 resolution by the International Marine Organisation requires pilots to take refresher navigation and ship handling courses every five years.
Re-training on a real ship is not cheap, so, at €6,000, for the week, the Polish course on miniature ships offers a full-size bargain.
Since 1990, upwards of 3,500 captains and marine pilots have trained at the Ship handling Research and Training Centre on the shores of Lake Slim, near the sleepy central Polish town of Ilawa.
“It would be difficult to name a seafaring nationality that we haven’t had here,” said scientific director Lech Kobylinski, professor at the Gdansk Polytechnic Academy, that helped set up the training centre.
The models are built on a 1:24 scale, so a 10-metre training ship represents a 240-metre supertanker, Prof. Kobylinski explained.
He insists computerised electronic simulators – although vital to training – cannot reproduce the complex dynamics of navigation, hence the need for hands-on model training.
Seafaring has always been dangerous, but the gargantuan proportions of modern ships challenge seamen like never before.
“Today the largest container ships are nearly 400 metres long. Manoeuvring a ship that’s nearly half a kilometre long – well you can imagine it can be problematic!” Prof. Kobylinski, also a professor of hydrodynamics with a half century of experience in the field, said.
As he deftly manoeuvred a miniature escort tug that looked a lot like a dinghy, Australian captain Colin Kesteven explained one advantage of practicing on models: “If you look at some of these models you’ll see scratches where we’ve tried something and it hasn’t worked very well and, of course, it’s better to try it on a model than on the real ships!” he said.
Recalling a 2007 shipping accident near San Francisco where an oil slick spread 300 kilometres up California’s coast, killing fish stocks and thousands of marine birds, Capt. Kesteven reminded that pilots need to remain sharp, and “training courses are a part of that. “The scope for disaster on the job is considerable,” he said of the COSCO Busan spill. The pilot went to jail, so it’s a very serious business.”
“On a ship, the captain is second only to God,” Prof. Kobylinski quipped. “So he better also be infallible.”