The expert technicians had been able to lay pipelines across the Bristol Channel and the Solent under the supervision of the designers, but it was another matter for the naval laying parties to achieve the same degree of proficiency under wartime conditions and across the much wider English Channel.[41] Sir Donald Banks wrote: "The technique of cable laying had been mastered but we were not yet sufficiently versed in the practice of connecting the shore ends, nor in effecting repairs to the undersea leaks which were caused fairly close inshore through these faulty concluding operations."[42]