Male and female ports, and cowcatchers on ferries.

[whole diary]

[grahame]

I had never thought of it before - but when you arrive on the ferry at [portname], does the ramp fingers come down from the ship (so a female port) or from the shore (a male port). Female posts are the most common ...

[PrestburyRoad]

I had never thought of it before - but when you arrive on the ferry at [portname], does the ramp fingers come down from the ship (so a female port) or from the shore (a male port). Female posts are the most common ...

I can think of a couple of reasons reason for the fingers to be on the ship.  Firstly, to avoid the ship having to be aligned precisely with fixed fingers at the port, and then stay aligned even in rough weather.  Secondly, if they are on the ship they are certain to be as wide as the loading door and thus maximise the speed of loading and unloading, whereas if they are on the shore and want to be efficiently wide they will have to be of variable width to fit the full range of ships that might use the port.   

[ChrisB]

They'll always be on the ship, won't they? Otherwise the fingers on the shore would need to actually rest on the ship somehow

[grahame]

They'll always be on the ship, won't they? Otherwise the fingers on the shore would need to actually rest on the ship somehow

Hard to find pictures that wouldn't require us to pay a license, but I think ships docking at Dover (and Calais) have link spans in the port that reach out even for vehicles to the ship.  And I think Red Funnel at Southampton might (at one time?) had fingers on the shore.    Discussion came from comments about the Isle of Innishfree which has what is described as a cowcatcher to let it load from such a structure.

[grahame]

I have found this of one of the ships:

[stuving]

Poole has a big linkspan that the ferry usually lowers its ramp (also an outer door when raised) onto. This has flaps, or longer fingers, on the end to take out any cross-slope. This linkspan also has a ramp on it it can lower, but this can also be raised as a whole high enough to leave the linkspan clear. The only pictures I can see are agency ones but e.g Alamy has it down, and dreamstime has it raised (see also Google Earth).

So I think that these days ferries have an outer door to protect the inner one, and this forms a pretty good ramp. Somewhere like St Malo has a long linkspan to cope with a large tidal range. This is heavy and cumbersome to adjust, and it's a lot easier to use without a ramp on it. But I'm sure I've seen them with a split arrangement, and a half-width ramp on the linkspan (or fixed quay if that works).

I don't seem to have pictures of any of these things, despite using loads of them. You'd need to be a passenger to be able to get pictures, I think.