As I said yesterday I was fortunate enough to get tickets to attend my first ship launch, that of HMS Defender at the BVT Surface Fleet yard in Govan.  This visit helped me to get a sense of the scales involved in building a ship this size and gave me some background context to the work that we do. The Ballast Trust has processed several shipbuilding collections and we are fortunate to have colleagues and volunteers who know a great deal about how a shipyard worked. One of my jobs is to try and capture this knowledge so that other newcomers to shipbuilding records can put the plans and drawings in the context of the process they supported, which will also help when cataloguing new collections.

Pictures from the day are available on our Flickr pages, there are more from other Flickr users here.  Mine aren't great, and its hard to get a sense of the scale from them so you'd be better off looking at this video on the BBC site.

This video has a good view from the water, particularly the work of the tugs after launch to manouver Defender around.