I think I've told the story before, but back in a former life I worked on the Jetties at Grangemouth Oil refinery.
My office was about 20 yards from one of the docks, with ships coming and going constantly, the bow thrusters churning the water right outside my window.
There are two things that stick in my memory from those days.
The first is the Russians. They were still the rather exotic Soviet Union in those days, and their ships would come in and offload their cargo. The sailors would then walk around the car park, and if they fancied the look of your car they would offer you cash to take it there and then. They couldn't afford the more high-end cars, obviously, but it was a good way for the staff (and their friends!) to get rid of some rustbuckets. The Soviet ships would head back to the Baltic with 20-30 cars strapped to their decks.
The other thing I remember is the water. The workers on the site used to joke that if you fell into the Forth, you wouldn't survive 30 seconds. Not because of the cold, but because of all the crap that was in there. Oil tankers aren't exactly clean beasts, and when you add spillages from them to the chemicals that would come off the site and the general detritus that accumulates around a port, the water was incredibly filthy. I always wondered just what those bow thrusters were churning up.
So I'm very pleased to see that ship-to-ship oil transfers in the Forth have been ruled out by the government. They're being restricted to just one place in UK waters, and I think even that is one place too many.
A massive oil spill in the Forth would have been devastating. The chances have been dramatically diminished by the removal of the threat of ship-to-ship transfers.
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