Before this the harbour had one ramp, thirty eight boats a week wanting it, and no way to run two operations at once. A slow unload at eight in the morning cost the whole day.
The extension added ninety metres of wall on the eastern side and a second ramp with its own apron, wide enough for a tractor and trailer to turn without reversing into the road.
The part worth recording is not the engineering. It is that the council introduced the two hour slot system at the same time, and would not have got it accepted a year earlier. Boat owners agreed to slots because there were now two ramps and a slot was no longer a rationing of the only one. Sequencing the rule after the concrete was deliberate.
Since the extension opened the harbour office logs about four hours of waiting a week, against roughly a day and a half before. Two complaints have been received, both about noise from the new apron at night, which is why loading now stops at nine rather than eleven.
