Adrian Morgan
CRAFTSMANSHIP
I
t has always been pretty laid back up here on the
wild waters above the back of beyond, 40 miles
south of Cape Wrath. No one bothered you much.
Things got done, in their own sweet West Coast manner.
Local sailors (of which I don’t count myself, born within
the sound of Bow bells) are intrepid and adaptable, in an
old-fashioned, self-sufficient kind of way.
It must be the same in some out-of-the-way muddy
reaches of the Essex marshes, where venerable wooden
boats cling to crumbling piles alongside clapboard
boatyards that appear as they did in faded copies of
yachting magazines from the 1950s. Probably, too,
among the wooded creeks of Maine.
But these outposts of self reliance are disappearing,
along with many of the old (often alarmingly
precarious) ways of doing things – launching, slipping
and mast-stepping, in our case, often involving diggers.
Last August, when a flash flood turned our little burn
to a Niagara, within hours the place was awash with
yellow JCBs. It seems every Highlander has one hidden
away, waiting for the excuse to dig something up, lay a
drain, step a mast, launch a boat. And believe me the
aftermath of hurricane Emma, or Ermintrude, or maybe
it was Gordon, took some digging. That was the day the
boat I was building floated for the first time, inside my
workshop. The tide mark is still visible on the peeling,
white distempered walls of the old cow shed where
Viking Boats of Ullapool scratches a precarious living.
Things, however, are getting less laid back by the
year. The greedy hands of government are creeping evernorthwards, reaching out to
throttle a way of life that took self
sufficiency for granted.
The rot set in, to my mind, a few
years ago when this outpost of
sailing anarchy succumbed finally to
the demands of the Crown Estate,
which claims the right to charge us
for the use of the 100 or so
moorings scattered around Loch
Broom and outlying sea lochs. Time
was you could drop a lump of
concrete or a couple of fish farm
anchors, connected by old anchor
chain, shackle on a riser and tie your
boat to it, for the price of the gear
and a bottle for the man who did it
for you. Now we pay an annual levy
simply to occupy a few square feet
of sea bed. We were even persuaded
to set up an association to collect it
as de facto HM tax collectors.
We had naively presumed the
dosh covered the cost of the
Duchess of Cornwall’s hats (fine by
me: the royals need to keep up
appearances at Ascot). In fact, it
goes into the Chancellor’s back
pocket: a tax, in other words, on
those who go down to the sea in little ships.
Do we see a penny in return? Pick-up buoys with the
royal coat of arms embossed in gold? Not so far. Just a
plastic tag. In the years we have been paying our levy,
which probably amounts to £40,000 or more, we have
scarcely seen £4 spent on improving our mooring.
We still have to buy and lay the mooring; and make
sure no one drops one a little too close for comfort when
the northwest wind blows into the anchorage. Nor does
the Crown Estate provide a diving service to help us
poor yachtsmen make sure the Chinese shackle we found
cheap in the North Kessock RNLI jumble sale attaching
riser to ground chain was made of steel not cheese.
The sea bed above which we have parked our boat, so
we are told, belongs to the Queen, although what she
wants with it is anyone’s guess, being mainly silt, with a
few rocky bits, some crabs and lots of kelp. Much of it,
no let’s face it, all of it, unlike the Home Counties or
even Aberdeenshire, she has never visited, and although
the Royal Yacht Britannia did annually cruise these
waters a while back the sighting from a croft house
overlooking the anchorage behind Isle Ristol of HRH in
a purple wetsuit can surely be discounted.Since writing this, it’s emerged that Scottish mooring
holders will soon be lining the pockets of the SNP
Government in Edinburgh (or perhaps ensuring Nicola
Sturgeon’s coiffure remains in perfect shape). Perhaps
we'll get a bit more for our money. Meanwhile south of
the border it’s the Chancellor who gets your dosh. – AMA tax on boat owners
An annual levy for a bit of sea bed. And for what in return?
“That
was the
day my
boat first
floated –
inside my
workshop”CHARLOTTE WATTERS