Hoft is Low German for a headland or point, and the point in question sits at Schulau, the southern district of Wedel, on the north bank of the Lower Elbe west of Hamburg. Every vessel bound for or leaving the port of Hamburg passes it. In June 1952 Otto Friedrich Behnke, who ran the Schulauer Fahrhaus - the Schulau ferry house, a restaurant - decided that they ought to be greeted properly, and set up a ship greeting station on his own terrace. The first ship saluted was the Japanese Agaki Maru, on 12 June 1952. The station is today run under the patronage of the Nautische Kameradschaft Hansea, and while the greeting has outlasted several changes of tenant at the restaurant, the arrangement has never stopped being what it was at the start: a private courtesy, offered to strangers, at a bend in a river.

The ceremony follows fixed rules. Inbound and outbound ships alike are saluted by dipping the Hamburg flag and hoisting the international signal for a good voyage, the letters U and W. For vessels over 1,000 gross tons leaving German waters there is a further honour: the national anthem of their country of registry, played between eight in the morning and sunset, or eight in the evening, whichever comes first. Ships are not obliged to respond, and most simply pass. Some dip their own ensign in return. Some sound the whistle, which on a large container ship is loud enough to rattle the coffee cups on the terrace. The station keeps recordings of the anthems of every maritime nation that maintains a shipping register - more than 150 of them - along with spoken welcome and farewell messages in the appropriate language. They exist in two parallel systems, digital and on compact cassette, the cassettes labelled in red for a welcome and black for a farewell, and either can be used.

The commentary is the part visitors remember. Hamburg's nautical reporting office notifies Schulau as soon as an inbound ship passes Stadersand, or an outbound one passes Finkenwerder, which gives the station its cue. Over the loudspeaker, the audience on the terrace gets the vessel's name, nationality, year of construction, builder, operator, length, beam and draught, and where it is known, her container capacity and whatever else is worth telling - the odd detail that makes one grey hull different from the next. None of this comes from a commercial database. It is drawn from a handwritten card index, continuously updated, covering roughly 17,000 ships. Somebody has been filling in those cards, by hand, for decades.

Five men perform the ceremony, and they are known as the Begrussungskapitane, the welcoming captains. As of late 2021 they were Eckart Bolte, Wolfgang Adler, Hartmut Hoffmann, Uwe Mohr and Wolfgang Eder. Their job looks simple from the terrace and is not: the timing of the flag, the choice of anthem, the running commentary, all of it keyed to a ship that is moving and will not wait. What they are maintaining is an old maritime idea - that the moment a vessel enters or leaves home waters deserves to be marked - kept alive on a stretch of river where the traffic is overwhelmingly commercial and nobody on board is expecting a welcome. It is a small piece of ceremony performed for an audience that mostly cannot hear it.

The Schulauer Fahrhaus still functions as a restaurant, with the greeting station as its reason for existing, and the terrace above the pier remains the place to watch from. You can drive out from Hamburg, but the better approach is the one that matches the subject: take a ferry down the Elbe from the St Pauli Piers and arrive by water, past the container terminals and the shipyards, on the same channel as the vessels being greeted. On a clear day the view across the river takes in the flat, orchard-covered shore of the Altes Land, and the ships come through in an unbroken procession, one every few minutes at busy times, each one briefly the centre of attention.