I have to say I think the FG is a big impediment to the picture and when I showed it to my wife, she said 'What is it actually a picture of?' She didn't mean she couldn't see it was about the Warrior, obviously. It was just that it includes so much the ship becomes just a 'bit' of the picture rather than the focal point.
I know what you mean about how you remember it, bearing in mind I know it very well as well as I live close by and have been down to the Warrior/Victory/Mary Rose et al many times. But the oft debated issue for photographers comes up here: Do you want a picture that is a record of the scene as you saw it on the day or do you want 'a picture'. What most of us want is a good picture that stands on its own, which I feel the cropped version is. Reportage photography is of course an equally valid field and provides images that are records of a specific place at a specific time: it is up to you to decide what you want at any given time.
In my humble opinion, this picture is too good to be just a record shot, it works so nicely as an image of the Warrior standing majestically in harbour. I think cloning the fence and blurring the pavement bricks would be a disaster, to be perfectly honest. Let me explain why:
That would effectively look like 10 feet of FG is out of focus but a mile beyond that is all in focus, something that would never happen in real life photography and so will automatically look unnatural. Also, cloning out that fence is harder than it looks: it took me a fair while to remove even the small amount of it left after I had cropped it. To remove it all I can guarantee you'll end up with a lot of repeat patterns from the cloning simply because you have't got enough source areas to clone from.
As I say, I am not saying this because of my crop, we are not talking about my picture or yours, these are both your pictures and you get all the credit for either one. I didn't change anything in my version in terms of colour, contrast, saturation, etc. I only cropped and cloned and that is it. This is your picture and a very good one it is
Cheers,
Rob