Many physical questions in fluid dynamics can be recast in terms of norm constrained optimisation problems; which in-turn, can be further recast as unconstrained problems on spherical manifolds thus reducing the large dimension of the control space. Due to the nonlinearities of the governing PDEs, and the computational cost of performing optimal control on such systems, improving the numerical convergence of the optimisation procedure is crucial. Borrowing tools from the optimisation on manifolds community [1,2] we outline a numerically consistent, discrete formulation of the direct-adjoint looping method accompanied by gradient descent and line-search algorithms with global convergence guarantees. Demonstrating the robustness of this formulation on three example problems of relevance in fluid dynamics we also provide an accompanying library SphereManOpt.