David Daniel, one of the most respected men within the European ship repair industry, has retired after 17 years as commercial director at A&P Falmouth.

Apart from his time at Falmouth, David has had an interesting and highly successful international career with Noble Denton, a globally recognised leader in marine assurance, surveying  and technical expertise.

David said: “I have had a most enjoyable time working at A&P Falmouth with a great team of people. The yard is highly respected within the industry. This is a credit to the entire workforce in Falmouth. At times it has been challenging, certainly interesting from day to day, but ship repair is not an easy business to work in these days.”

A&P Falmouth managing director Peter Child said: “David Daniel is a true gentleman, Cornishman and master mariner and will be sorely missed by all in A&P. David joined A&P in 1997 as commercial director and since then we have never made a loss, the levels of business and repeat business have grown and grown and now we have 13 grey ships based in Falmouth and are seen as the fourth naval yard in the UK. Much of that is thanks to David and the team.

“We had a very good send off on Friday and I am delighted to report David will still be around to help Falmouth going forward both with our commercial work and the MARS tanker contract we recently secured.”

David intends working part time for A&P during his retirement.

He is the son of the late Bedford Daniel, a former Mayor of Penryn, and Mayoress Gwen Daniel, who still lives in the town.

Educated at Truro School, David went to sea in 1970 with the British India Steam Navigation Company as a deck cadet. He sailed on a variety of general cargo and heavy lift ships mainly on far east trades with the B.I.S.N. company and P&O.

A chartered naval architect and master mariner, David obtained a BSc (Hons) at Southampton University before going to Newcastle University where he gained an MSc in marine technology.

Having completed his studies a four year long posting to Dubai saw David working for Noble Denton. Here as senior engineer he surveyed VLCCs (very large crude carrier) and ULCCs (ultra large crude carrier) damaged by missile attacks as a result of the Iran/Iraq war.

As tow master, rig master or warranty surveyor David clocked up 85 rig moves during his time in the Gulf/India region.

For five years David was senior principal  engineer for Noble Denton Norway. Seconded to Staoil he was responsible for the initial design and functional requirements for a 145,000 tonnes FPSO for the Asgard field offshore Norway.

Then he was seconded to Norwegian contractor A/S, in Oslo, where he was responsible for the engineering design of the marine operations for the installation of the Heidrun tension leg platform, a 300,000 tonnes displacement floating concrete platform close to the Arctic Circle in the Norwegian Sea.

David was offshore installation superintendent for the world's largest tension leg platform which included supervising a world first for deep water installation of  21,000 tonnes foundation structures by controlled ballasting.

The Heidrun platform is one of the most technologically advanced structures of its kind in operation today.

David finished his time with Noble Denton as South East Asia operations manager responsible for the day to day management of offices in Singapore, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur, managing teams of surveyors, consulting engineers and marine staff offshore.

In his spare time David hopes to share more time with his wife Hilary, two sons James and Tom and the rest of his family.