That’s interesting. It still seems merchant ships almost never just manoeuvre for the training of the officers. A first manoeuvre is a real one. Some hesitancy may be justified by scheduling or fuel economy constraints but I see ships at anchor off ports waiting for a berth and surely they could do something prior to anchoring if they know there’s time by dropping a man overboard dummy and doing the full drill for a few times.
All of my deck officers have departed the berth and brought the ship alongside and we schedule a half a day occasionally when no operations are programmed just for this purpose with more emphasis on the most likely to be called on to do it. Nervousness dissipates after four or five runs and more fine points can be made if the officer conning is at least comfortable of the basics.
Finally, talking of single screw ships, I was a deck officer on a naval tanker single screw steam turbine of 26,000 tons displacement (near fully laden) when the captain berthed her at Point Murat, North West Cape (a VLF transmission station for USN and our submarines).
No tugs, no pilot, no thrusters, tiny wharf with dolphins off either end all much shorter than the ship. First and last time I witnessed dredging an anchor in the navy. Messy but successful and I was impressed then and even more now. There was some urgent imperative to supply fuel to the station after normal commercial supplies failed so the task was unusual for a fleet underway replenishment ship and not exactly handy to manoeuvre normally using two tugs at berthing.