JOHN MACLEOD: A mainland excursion by ferry? I'm taking a chance on the antique boat show
I am meant to be in Glasgow next Thursday evening for some glitzy function – all starched shirtfronts and varnished hors d'oeuvres – but between the mainland and I are miles of roiling Hebridean sea.
And, as so often these days in the Western Isles, few plans of action survive contact with Caledonian MacBrayne.
The lad at their Stornoway booking-office on Monday could not have been nicer. He jabbed at his computer like an industrious woodpecker, pinging back and fore between Tarbert to Uig and Stornoway to Ullapool, as scheduled sailing after scheduled sailing proved to be fully booked.
With a pause for some dark murmurs about camper-vans, I was finally squeezed in on the late afternoon crossing to Skye next Wednesday with return, by an early afternoon sailing to Harris, a week later.
Neither is ideal. The journey south will probably have to be broken by a night in a hotel – elderly mothers do not care for their firstborn to clatter through the door near midnight – and the journey back by further B&B resort or getting up at oh-gosh o'clock.
But you cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good, so I surrendered on these terms and bought my tickets.
Then, on Tuesday afternoon, I spotted something on Facebook and collapsed with a hollow groan.
The ship in question, the Hebrides – just scant weeks back from her annual overhaul – has a broken bow-visor.
For the next few days, she will be loading stern-only and be forced to turn around on arrival at every port. Big lorries, caravans and that will have to reverse aboard and, accordingly, with all the concomitant delays, her timetable has to be recast.
And, though the visor might well be fixed within a few days, it cannot be used again till yellow-vested jobsworths have travelled north - very slowly, at some point in June - to sign off on its safety.
We were assured the revised programme would be up on the CalMac website within the hour. I checked after tea. It wasn't. I checked again in the late evening. The website was closed, derelict and dumb for 'routine maintenance.'
Then, this morning, a text-message pinged on my mobile. 'Due to an issue with MV Hebrides bow-visor… your sailing from Tarbert to Uig n Wed 21 May will now depart at 17.20. Please check in no later than 16.35…'
I all but flung the phone across the room.
The inability of Caledonian MacBrayne to describe breakdowns, mechanical failure, collisions with the pier or bits of the boat falling off in pure plain English has long been a signal trial.
The Cumbrae ferry, a company spokesman once honked, was temporarily out of action after 'contact with the sea bed.'
Or, as we used to put it, had run aground.
Not a week now passes when we are spared headlines about Caledonian MacBrayne 'issues.'
Ships stuck in dry-dock with intractable problems. A Sound of Harris ferry with dodgy propulsion-units. Passengers having to board at Stornoway by the vehicle-deck because the mechanised gangway has been broken since about 2022.
The vast Isle of Mull, allowed to carry no more than 44 fare-paying passengers because her escape-chutes don't work. Reduced vehicle capacity on the Hebrides because her aft mezzanine deck has conked out.
And meanwhile, and as if to add insult to injury, it was on Tuesday announced that the new vessel Glen Rosa – meant to be sailing in 2018; still, for now, a static Port Glasgow art-installation – will be delayed by another six months.
Oh, and £35 million more from the long-suffering taxpayer, please. Does anything more exemplify 'Broken Britain' than the ongoing travails of Caledonian MacBreakdown?
The sad thing is that none of this is, fundamentally, the company's fault and anyone who travels regularly by CalMac – 'issues' permitting – can attest to the courtesy and good humour of her shore-staff and crews.
The failure is political; the wilful refusal to grasp that ships age and depreciate and must, in a calm and ongoing programme, be regularly replaced.
In the eighteen years of averred Scottish woe under the distant regimes of Thatcher and Major, six major new ships were built for CalMac, and ten smaller double-ended ferries.
The numbers so far delivered by the Nationalists, after their eighteen years in devolved power, are three and three.
When John Whittle transformed the company, in assorted Gourock roles from 1969 to 1988 and with a protracted public-spending crisis, he nevertheless replaced pleasure-steamers and glorified puffers with an efficient car-ferry network and delivered untold islands from the age of the coracle.
Whittle accomplished this because CalMac organisation and the chain of command was far simpler and public accountability very clear.
The company was one leg of the Scottish Transport Group stool – the others were the Scottish Bus Group, and MacBrayne Haulage – and answerable to the Secretary of State for Scotland.
And, every year, he laid a detailed STG report before Parliament.
And John Whittle – though he ingeniously updated assorted routes by adapting and rebuilding quite a few ships – was not in the least sentimental about tired old bangers.
On his watch, and with but one exception – and she had recently been reengined – ships were sold off around their 20th or 25th birthdays, for new careers elsewhere (usually in the Piraeus) till finally wrecked.
Every five years by law, you see, a passenger ship must have a particularly exhaustive and indeed expensive 'quinquennial survey,' and by their third decade few vessels are worth it.
We chatted about this in 2022 and Whittle could not hide his incredulity that, under his successors, Caledonian MacBrayne was still operating glorified rust-buckets in their thirties and forties.
Patching up this and that with, one supposes, gaffer-tape, or the odd firm thump on the top of the set, and sourcing spare parts from the British Museum. At ongoing and eyewatering expense.
Though I have always damned as vile calumny that, early in her career, the Isle of Cumbrae served at the Battle of Lepanto, or that Vasco da Gama was ever captain of her.
There is a deeper cultural problem. Whatever you might think of the Thatcher years, the men of standing at the time (and they were mostly men) in Westminster or Whitehall had a far better feel for the Highlands and Islands.
Many were war veterans, alongside doughty Hebrideans; many routinely holidayed in the pursuit of stags, salmon and grouse.
As my late grandfather always maintained, the foe of the Gael has never been the Englishman: it is the Lowland Scot. And in the comfortable Edinburgh ranks of the devolved nomenklatura – the school-run to Watson's, murmured luncheons at the New Club - most know nothing about ferries, and care less.
Which is why any excursion to the mainland, these days, is to take your chances with the antique boat show – and the stuff of Russian roulette.
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