Arresting a Ship

I’ve managed to do very little sailing this year, with only one overnight stop, in a favourite spot, which I’ve often posted about, Toberonochy

But in other ways it’s been one of the most fascinating seasons yet.

At the beginning of the summer, Anne and I got a rather mysterious message from Switzerland asking us to keep the last week in July free, with further instructions to come. Then came another invitation, to one of Scotland’s most interesting and historic corners, Roshven, close to Ardnamurchan.

It’s not every day that you get invited to the hundredth birthday of a boat, in fact it’s only happened to me once before, see here, The Story of the Scottie

To celebrate the occasion, I wrote the story behind it. Here goes!

Ceann Tràgha

Kentra is the anglicised form of two Scots Gaelic words. Ceann means a head, while tràigh, here in its genitive form tràgha, can mean a number of things, such as a shore, a  strand or a bay. Thus Kentra means “Head of the Bay” and is the name of a bay with astonishingly large mud flats when the tide is out. This part of Scotland has an interesting history and is known in Gaelic as Na Garbh-chrìochan, “the Rough Bounds”. Not far from Kentra Bay, on a little island, are the ruins of an Caisteal Tioram, “the dry castle”, dating back to the time of the first Lord of the Isles, Somerled, who ruled in the Twelfth Century. 

King Somerled in an angry mood

The castle was burnt and destroyed during the first Jacobite Rebellion in 1715. Happily, the area is a safer place to visit today! 

Kentra’s first owner, Kenneth Clark, a member of the Coats/Clark Paisley cotton dynasty, bought the Ardnamurchan estate in 1916, a huge slice of land that stretched from the River Shiel right across to the westmost point of the British mainland, and which included Kentra Bay on its northern shoreline. The estate included Glenborrodale Castle, then quite a modern, late Victorian, red sandstone building, finished in 1901. He lived in slightly smaller accommodation at Shielbridge House, on the banks of the River Shiel and used the castle mainly for socialising, when it wasn’t let out to people such as Sir Thomas Lipton and Sir Thomas Sopwith. His visitors included King George V in his yacht Britannia. 

In 1916 he provided the local community with the Shielbridge Hall, a community facility, which is still in use. After his death in 1933 the estate was sold. Glenborrodale Castle has since been used sometimes as an hotel and sometimes as a private house, but Shielbridge House was demolished by a later owner in the 1950s, after the government introduced a tax on very large houses and many estate owners decided to destroy their properties rather than pay it.

Kenneth Clark also had houses in the South of England and on the Riviera, which probably suited his busy lifestyle as a sportsman and a gambler rather better than the quiet west coast of Scotland. Was he truly “the Man who broke the Bank in Monte Carlo”? Perhaps not, as it seems that the title should go to Charles de Ville Wells, who died in 1922. 

It must remain a puzzle why such a fellow as Kenneth Clark commissioned a true sea going sailing ship and, of course, we know that he sold her within a year. Perhaps he decided that his health wasn’t up to a round the world trip. Whatever his reason for commissioning Kentra, we owe him our thanks for one of William Fife’s most beautiful creations.

Arresting a Ship

By the time I first heard of Kentra, in the early 1990s, I had been running my law practice in the centre of  Glasgow for many years. Our office was situated in an historic building overlooking Royal Exchange Square, the heart of the old commercial sector. I enjoyed the pleasant working space too much to join one of the bigger law firms, and the autonomy gave me the freedom to decide what work I wanted to take on. 

Because people knew of my interest in ships and the sea, problems with a maritime flavour tended to come my way. These were rarely straightforward, but always interesting. I found myself advising a firm of deep sea divers who had bought the Fairlie Pier and through them I met Archie MacMillan, the final director of the Fife yard, where Kentra had been built. Archie even persuaded me to moor my own yacht, Stroma, at Fairlie for a few years, before the long stretch of mud at low tide eventually made me return to deeper waters.

Stroma at Crinan, 2008

One day my accountant friend, Bill Cameron, invited me to look at a problem that had arisen at the old McGruer yard at Clynder, not far from the Royal Northern Yacht Club base near Helensburgh. She had arrived in Scotland for renovation after a hard working life in the Mediterranean. Her latest owner, said to be a fellow in the olive oil business who lived in the Dakota Building in New York, had apparently disappeared, leaving a squad of skilled craftsmen and the yard’s owners looking for their money. To make matters more exciting, it was even rumoured that a certain Brigitte  Bardot had been sailing on her; one hopes that she would have taken her sharp heeled shoes off when she went aboard. What a wonderful case to land on my desk!

Among the things that attract young people to a career in the law are television programmes showing fantastically clever attorneys defending clients on terribly serious charges and getting them off due to their sheer brilliance, although also perhaps because, of course, the clients are always innocent. My equivalent ambitions, having been obsessed with boats and ships from an early age, were rather different. They included arresting ships by nailing writs to their masts, a  procedure which caused a sailing ship to be kept in port in foreign parts until all her bills had been settled. I never thought that I might end up doing this in practice, although as it turned out in my case, no nails were to be involved; indeed there was no mast on Kentra.

Arrestment is a procedure that has been around for ever and the rules surrounding it form one of the oldest parts of international maritime law. Problems that were first seen centuries years ago are in principle the same as today’s, when, for example, a container ship goes aground in the Suez Canal and incurs enormous charges. 

As I had never arrested a ship before, I started asking around and soon discovered that while an older lawyer friend had spent a lifetime working in shipping law and had occasionally secured an arrestment, the owner had always turned up with a payment to prevent his vessel being sold. With my friend’s help and a visit to the library we got the case started. It seemed that a mast was an essential part of the procedure, but the Sheriff at the court in Dumbarton confirmed that using sticky tape to attach the writ to any permanent part would suffice.

When the owner had failed to respond to various efforts to notify him the Sheriff ordered that Kentra be sold by public auction, to take place in the Commodore Hotel in Helensburgh, rather an appropriately named place. He had never granted such an order before and decided to set out some detailed rules, providing that there would be an upset price of twenty thousand pounds and bids would be throughout in units of one thousand. This was to guarantee in due course rather a long day!

A few days before the sale I had a telephone call from a Swiss gentleman who informed me that he intended to bid. Because of the obvious conflict of interest, as I was in a sense now acting for the court, I introduced him to a good friend, Graham Wilson, sadly no longer with us, who had served in the Royal Navy before becoming a lawyer and who lived in Helensburgh. When I first called Graham, he thought that I was joking, but the next call from Switzerland put him right.

On the appointed day the bidding went quickly up to £28,000, after which a well known local car dealer dropped out, then proceeded, in bids of one thousand pounds, until a major international brokerage firm gave up and Graham’s new client, Ernst, found himself not only with a yacht, but also a slice of heritage that has engaged him and Doris for the last three decades.

The sale produced sufficient funds to clear all the sums due to known creditors, but a few others now turned up and created problems which belong more appropriately to a textbook on insolvency law than here. I was greatly relieved to be able to pay the sale proceeds into the Sheriff Court and leave it to others to sort out who got what.

The new owners decided to have Kentra restored by Duncan Walker and his crew at Fairlie Restorations, who had already returned several other Fife masterpieces to life in their yard by the Hamble. To get her to Southampton was to involve a sea voyage the length of the West coast, round Land’s End, in late autumn. Being an empty hulk, there was no question of her travelling on her own keel. 

The legendary Harry Spencer of Cowes, the doyen of riggers worldwide, was contracted to handle the voyage on a special barge to be towed behind his private tug. The largest mobile crane in Scotland, belonging to Baldwins of Grangemouth was engaged and brought across from the far side of Scotland by Mr Baldwin in person.

 

Here we see  Duncan Walker, myself and Graham Wilson, on a cold, late Autumn morning, before the fun commenced.

This all took place on what I believe was Harry Spencer’s seventieth birthday in September 1995 and I imagine he was totally in his element, shown standing on the deck of Kentra in this photograph. 

The voyage south took, I’ve been told, a couple of weeks. Bad weather set in and the underwriters insisted on the journey being broken and days being spent in port before the final, risky, rounding of Land's End could take place. One suspects that Harry and his crew will have enlivened things in a few unsuspecting, remote taverns on the fringes of Wales. Happily all went well and Kentra was successfully delivered into the hands of Duncan and his crew at the Hamble.

I have borrowed this great image of Harry from the Cowes Heritage website.

I feel enormously privileged that a legal case thirty years ago has led to lasting friendships. 

The 1998 Fife Regatta

The first Fife Regatta in 1998 was an especially emotional experience for all of us, overshadowed by the loss of Eric Tabarly in the Irish Sea. With only a dozen or so yachts attending, the available spaces, such as the historic Kelburn Castle, had enough space to accommodate everyone as we came to terms with the sense of shock for all of us and personal grief for those who had known Eric. Later events have not quite managed to recreate the feelings of intimacy.

I was happy to be able to help Jimmy Houston with the organising and as a result managed to sign up in the French merchant navy to sail aboard Moonbeam for a couple of days, but the real delight was spending a day aboard Kentra in the Kyles of Bute.

Three days after my return to Argyll came the real surprise, thanks to that pink cap. There it was, bobbing along behind the hedge at the front of our garden, a hundred sea miles from the Firth of Clyde. Without anyone aboard knowing where we lived, not only Kentra, but  Pen Duick as well, were moored in a sheltered bay about a kilometre from our house!

Fearnach Bay, with its ancient pier, a relic from the days when the local industry was making gunpowder, has since become a favourite anchoring spot for Kentra.

A Feature of the West Coast

We are always very pleased to see Kentra and  are amazed at her people's tolerance of our Scottish weather, which often provides four seasons in one single day.

Last summer, I had headed off aboard my new little boat, Mariota, launched in 2019, with my good friends Margaret and Vicky. At the North of the Isle of Seil there is a well known anchorage, Puilladhobhran, “the Pool of the Otter”, which we tend to avoid, as it’s like a parking lot in summer, so we anchor in a more private spot. Once settled, we looked along the shore and, also avoiding the crowd, there was Kentra!

It’s wonderful to see Kentra in spectacular condition as she enters her second century and her present custodians have our grateful thanks for all you have done to bring this wonderful piece of heritage back to life. 

The Scottish Islanders

 

Above is a fantastic photograph of the fleet racing in the last major event before war put a stop to such things. When I was putting my book together, I was delighted at the support from companies such as Beken, who were content for me to use a portrait image of my own Islander, Stroma, without payment. This image isn't in the book, it came from someone whose forebears had purchased a copy at the time. Perhaps we'll eventually do a reprint.

The feedback from purchasers has been very positive, also I've been getting sent material, such as the photograph, also anecdotes about the boats and their families, which is making the whole exercise feel very worth while. There's a lot of social history that deserves to be recorded, not just regarding the older, rather patrician families, but also just about the characters who made the west coast and its little bays and havens a lot of fun. I'm thinking of men like Boyd Keen, who made it into the book, and the recently departed and much loved Cubby MacKinnon, about whom a book, Mistress and Commander, appeared a few years ago.

Seriously, the book is quite a limited print run, and it's selling quite well, via social media only, because the margin between cost and retail price rules out major bookshops. So, if you want a copy, or know someone whom you think might enjoy it, you can find the online shop at

www.shop.yachtarchive.scot

Christmas Approaching

Time for a reminder that my book on the Scottish Islanders is out. With Christmas approaching it might even solve a problem, if you need a present for a salty old uncle or aunt!
The book has been very professionally put together and is fully illustrated with archive and modern photographs and artwork. It should be of interest to those interested in our social history, as well as our sailors. 
Copies can be acquired online at: 

https://www.shop.yachtarchive.scot

The First Review is out!

 

It's great to see the first review, with a couple more in the pipeline. Also, readers are getting back and seem to be enjoying my efforts. The online shop now has its own dedicated website, so to buy a copy use this link:

shop.yachtarchive.scot

The Scottish Islanders

 

Following my post about the Scottish Yachting Archives, I’m writing to let people know that my book, The Scottish Islanders, is now in print.

The Scottish Islanders were a fleet of identical sailing yachts launched from 1929. Designed, built and organised to ensure absolutely level competition, winning was entirely down to boat handling skills and cunning. In the years before the war they were sailed by some of Glasgow’s best known business families, who abandoned their home comforts each weekend to race against each other, regardless of the weather, sometimes the only fleet seen out on the Firth of Clyde. Their antics excited interest far beyond the yachting fraternity and were eagerly covered in the national press.

I acquired Stroma, number Four in the Scottish Islands Class in September 1976, and over the next four decades kept her mainly on the west coast, before finally passing her on to new owners just a few years ago. Over that period I gathered a huge amount of information and over the last twenty years or so I’ve been putting together a book on them, based on research into the interesting group of families who first owned them, reports from their descendants and my own experiences of sailing in one. For nearly a hundred years the Islanders have been a feature on the west coast. They still regularly turn out for West Highland Week.

The first part of the book has a lot of social history and stories about some remarkable people, such as Udy Russell, a pioneer of women on water. There are occasional excursions abroad, when the Scots did battle with America’s best in Oyster Bay, outside New York. This section ends with a look at the return of the survivors postwar.

The book then moves on to tell a story of decline, when the yacht racing fraternity moved away from wooden boats, but the Scottish Islanders survived in the hands of people who just wanted to sail and who appreciated craftsmanship, style and seaworthiness. They had become cheap enough for young people to buy and use for coastal cruises. The survival of most of the fleet has provided colourful tales of exploits and excursions, as new generations of sailors, very different from the original group, continue to discover the fun of exploring the west coast of Scotland, with the boats still winning races and always turning heads.

I had nearly given up hope of finding a publisher until my old friends Dr William Collier and Antony Harrison told me that they had set up the Scottish Yachting Archives, an operation dedicated to ensuring that the history of sailing on the west coast is preserved. To date they've acquired the records of the William Fife dynasty and the G L Watson design business, a total of several thousand drawings and artefacts, all now preserved in their unit in central Glasgow. Part of their operation will involve publishing, and I’m delighted to report that my book is their first venture.

I'm also delighted that the Rockfield Centre in Oban has agreed to host the book launch in the cafe in the afternoon of Saturday 28th October.

In the meantime, copies of the book can be got via shop.yachtarchive.scot.

A very short Trip

 

This summer has been utterly dreadful here in mid Argyll. As we head into the second half of the season I'm wondering if I should believe optimistic locals here assuring us that there will be an Indian Summer, starting any day now.

After another couple of weeks of extremely unsettled conditions, the forecasts a few days ago promised a couple of days of sunshine and light westerlies, so I headed off on Monday with three plastic boxes containing lunch, dinner and breakfast. 

Long term readers of this blog will know that Toberonochy is one of my favourite places, sheltered from anything with west in it and excellent holding ground. So, off I went in the late morning, tacking into a light westerly, but there was not too much of the promised sun. By the time I was half way down the loch the wind was really getting up, with some dirty black clouds bringing nasty puffs, but I figured that as I got closer to Shuna and then Luing there would be a bit of a lee, so decided not to reef and pressed on. Mariota is actually a much tougher wee boat than she might appear and there were no scary moments. 

Outside the bay I hove too and got anchor, chain, warp and tripping line nicely rigged and flaked, then sheeted in and tacked up inshore of Mariota's older sister Minna. When I started sailing I tended not to use a tripping line and was perhaps lucky never to lose an anchor, although fifty years ago the seabed wasn't littered so much with discarded fishing gear and debris from abandoned fish farms. Another problem in recent years is the growth of kelp, which seems to be taking over everywhere, perhaps also a bi-product of fish farming, via the excess nutrients dumped in the water column. This can mean that the anchor never actually reaches the seabed, an issue if you're using a wee Bruce or similar type of hook. Even if it makes its way through, it will likely come up with a load of heavy material, giving the foredeck hand a nasty job and maybe rendering the boat difficult to steer until it's cleared. And working alone, it's essential to get back to the helm sharpish, once you're clear. A problem with a tripping line can arise when some lazy fellow comes in after you and mistakes it for a mooring, which traditionally caused some to paint some strong language on the float. With a long line it's possible to keep it on the foredeck.

        

There was no real reason to go ashore, but having brought the tender I went for a walk up to the old Kilchattan church. Over the years I've tried unsuccessfully to get a good photograph of the ancient graffiti, which is as interesting as the church itself. This time the light was perfect and it worked!

    

You can read more about the history behind this here: From Toberonochy to the Battle of Largs

And since writing that earlier post a kind friend has donated an authentic image of the battle.

When I turned in, the forecast was for a day of beautiful sunshine and a gentle westerly breeze, so it was a surprise when, just after I had taken down the cockpit tent, black clouds came over with quarter of an hour of a strong, very cold northwesterly and a downpour. Then, all was calm. The anchor came up loaded with mud, no kelp at all. I rigged the electric outboard and used about 0.5% of the battery storage travelling at about two knots across to the mouth of Loch Melfort.

Off Kilchoan, the wind arrived, providing a dead run back to base. I was lucky to be hooked up before it strengthened to a fierce, cold blow that lasted until night time.  

Summer Report

Here in mid Argyll it's been a very mixed summer for sailing. We had a great spell of sunny weather in June, but with many days when there was either no wind at all, or a furious land breeze brought on by the heat. Then it seemed that summer had gone, and for a month there we had cold wet days, with a lot of easterlies, which here mean nasty squalls and no fun at all. The image above was taken by pals on one of the few recent good days.

We have had some interesting visitors to our loch. A month ago the extraordinary Kaos managed to squeeze her way into the head of the loch, the flagship of a Walmart heiress with, one understands, two skippers and a crew of forty two. The weather was dreadful that day, with little visibility and lots of rain, so it wasn't a surprise when she left and returned to warmer climes, where she was visited by environmental activists with pots of red paint. 

Around the same time, there arrived on our shore one of the oddest ships we've seen ever seen here, a reinterpretation of one of the oldest craft in the world, and the brain child of the guru of Ullapool. Arriving in bits, it took him some time to connect it all together, with what looked like scaffolding poles.

I declined the chance to spend a wet weekend on Eilean na Gamhna, the Isle of the Stirks at the head of our loch.

The weather improved the next day and the Admiral posted this image of her travelling fast.

Finally, a visit from a ship that would suit fine, if one were seeking a live-aboard and had a bit of cash.

Built by Hall Russell of Aberdeen in 1963, she's one of the last of the fine, stylish cruisers that Scotland once produced in great numbers. Now named Jura II and sailed by her hands-on owner, Cameron McColl, it was lucky that we had a fine morning for me to get out for a photograph.

The lack of good sailing days hasn't bothered me too much, as I've been very busy with the publishers of my book on the magical fleet of Scottish Islanders, one of which, Stroma, adorns the top of this blog.  I'll soon be in a position to reveal full details, so, if you're interested in traditional boats and the folk who fall in love with them, watch this space! In the meantime, see my last post for information on the Scottish Yachting Archives.

The Scottish Yachting Archives

William Collier and David Gray

I’m just back from a fascinating visit to the Scottish Yachting Archives, run by my old friends Dr William Collier and Antony Harrison.

My association with William and Antony goes back over thirty years, to the time they acquired the business of G L Watson & Company Limited. The founder, George Lennox Watson, pioneered the idea of a pure yacht design company not associated with a working boat yard. This meant that you would get a well engineered design that could then be taken to any of the ship yards and boat builders operating around the Firth of Clyde for tendering. By contrast, builders such as the Fifes would expect a client to have them carry out the whole operation, from initial discussions to launching your yacht from the muddy shore at Fairlie.

Despite these different approaches there was no hostility between Watson and his contemporary, the third William Fife, the latter frequently building the former’s designs and both no doubt benefiting from the other’s ideas. There have been numerous articles written about the relations among one of these brilliant men and the third member of Scotland’s great boat design trilogy, Alfred Mylne, who was trained by Watson and left to form his own company, again a pure design agency, at the age of twenty four. I and others have written about this elsewhere; my own view is that the idea of conflict between Watson and Mylne has been at least partly stirred up by some of those who followed, to nobody’s credit. While Mylne lived until the late 1950s, his mentor Watson worked himself to death at the age of 51 in 1904, so there have been no living witnesses to speak for him. ‘S e saoghal beag a h’ ann, it’s a small world, as the Gaels say, and my own view is that there would have been enough work to keep all of these fellows too busy to spend time squabbling. The good news is that their successors are on the best of terms and it’s not true to say, if it ever was, that “Mylnes don’t drink with Watsons”, as the lead photograph shows.

William and his opposite number at Mylnes, David Gray, share the ambition of keeping the surviving records and artefacts safe for posterity, despite the truth that such things are expensive to preserve and there’s almost no chance of profit from old drawings. Having said this, many of those plans are capable of producing fast, safe, wholesome boats, as we saw exactly a year ago at the Fife Regatta, when Hubert Stagnol launched his lovely recreation of Watson’s Red, the first one design in the world, into Scottish waters at Portavadie.

Red at the Fife Regatta, photo from Marc Turner

The archives also contain, at the more extreme end, a few designs that were never built at all, perhaps because the building techniques and materials then available couldn’t have made them strong enough. There have already been a few recreations of boats actually built, German Sonderklasse and American carpetbaggers being examples, using modern epoxy resin techniques. While Watson preferred to concentrate on sea keeping ability, the Fife archives contain several enticing possibilities for those seeking pure fun.

So, to the Scottish Yachting Archives, located in one of Glasgow’s many cultural hubs, an old industrial building that is now home to many in the arts and creative sectors, next to the historic Forth and Clyde canal.

I was astonished at the sheer volume of materials, from actual drawings, working notes and specifications, to builder’s half models and client’s full models, to volumes of records, correspondence and the occasional fragment of an actual vessel. Families have donated their albums of photographs, while my friends have examined auction catalogues at home and abroad to locate and bid for anything relevant. Surprise finds have included a model, made for an aristocratic client, found in a sale of agricultural machinery in Switzerland.

The unit in the north of central Glasgow is very much a working hub, rather than a potential museum that people can drop into, so the more obvious public benefits will be seen in what emerges in due course from the analysis and research that I saw going on. One aspect of this will be a series of published works on aspects of yacht and boat design and construction in the Scottish golden years, for which purpose my friends have established a publishing imprint. This has led me to the best bit of serendipity to come my way in years!

I bought a Scottish Islands Class yacht, designed by Alfred Mylne, when in my twenties, as an affordable way to get afloat, but ended up keeping her for over forty years, during which time such little ships acquired the status of classics. Towards the end of 2010 I conceived the idea of writing a history of the class and to this end set up a blog, Scottish Islands Class, which in turn led to an initial draft of a book three years later.

It then took a further decade to follow the leads that arrived in online comments, before I was in a position to start propositioning established publishers. The results were in virtually all cases the total absence of even an acknowledgment. A couple of very small operations did reply, negatively but at least politely. Learning of William’s ambition to start an imprint was therefore a piece of unimaginable good fortune, especially when he read the text and decided to go with it.

On the face of things, the Scottish Islanders may seem to be something of a niche interest. Only a dozen were built and there are few survivors from among the early sailors, although three nonagenarians shared their memories. Because of this I have broadened the scope.

The work starts with something of a social history of some of Glasgow’s families at play a hundred years ago, then takes us through their struggles as the survivors returned to sailing after the war and finally moves into our times, when a new generation now cherish these remarkably sea worthy and fast little yachts as basic cruisers. I’ve added in a few west coast anecdotes and sketches for good measure. If I’ve sparked your interest, please feel free to send me a message by commenting here.

A New Season awaits

 

Just a quick reminder that I'm still here and hope to be posting more often as the year goes on.

A great delight about living beside the sea is that Mariota can be run down the drive, across a single track road and over the foreshore when the tide is out, to float off later and be towed to her mooring.

I've had a lazy winter, as far as maintenance is concerned, just a few spots touched up and of course that dreaded antifouling.