Crew defies 30ft waves to save ship
Major rescue operation as vessel heads for rocks
A SHIP’S crew had to battle 30ft waves and gale force winds through the night to stop their vessel crashing into rocks.
The 174ft Fame became the centre of a major rescue operation after it reported losing power off the Hebridean island of Taransay and began to drift westwards.
The fish farm cargo ship, with five crew on board, then struggled amid huge waves and Force Ten winds on Thursday night.
Lifeboats from Leverburgh and Stornoway, and a Coastguard helicopter from Stornoway, went to its aid.
A spokesman for Stornoway Coastguard said the vessel is a regular sight around the isles used by fish farms and had left Uig on Lewis earlier that day.
He added: ‘Its engines seized and it came within 150yd of rocks off Scarp.
‘The crew managed to hold it with its anchors and it then managed to get into deeper water using its bow thrusters and auxiliary power.’
The Maritime & Coastguard Agency (MCA) emergency towing vessel (ETV) Ievoli Black, based in Orkney, also headed towards the stricken vessel and established a tow around 9am yesterday.
Coastguard Commander Peter Davies said: ‘We are continuing to monitor the situation to avoid any risk to the remaining crew and damage to the vessel.
‘The five crew and the RNLI allweather lifeboats have been battling bad weather conditions all night to keep the vessel from grounding and we have so far managed to stabilise the vessel.’
The Fame was last night being towed to Stornoway and was due to arrive this morning.
The incident has sparked renewed calls for a second Coastguard ETV to be stationed on the west coast. The four vessels serving the UK six years ago – two in Scotland – have been whittled down to one in Orkney.
Western Isles MP Angus MacNeil said: ‘It took 14 hours to reach this vessel – how many times do we have 14 hours to save a life?’
A spokesman for the MCA said: ‘The operational experience of the past six years has demonstrated that a single ETV has been sufficient.’
As dawn broke over the lifeboat station which guards scrabster harbour and the restless expanse of the Pentland Firth beyond, Wing Munro found himself in uncharted waters.
For as long as anyone can remember, he would head down to the rough-harled RNLI building to pore over sea charts and weather forecasts, and monitor radio messages for signs of mariners in distress.
Whenever the shout for help came, it was invariably Wing – as coxswain of the Thurso lifeboat – who would scramble the volunteer crew, take the helm of their severn Class rescue vessel, The Taylors, and head out into the eye of the storm.
But today will be different. Today, he no longer rises before the lark to risk his life to save others in one of the most treacherous stretches of the scottish coast. After an almost unparalleled near-half century of service in the RNLI, Wing Munro has retired.
Locally, there is a palpable sense of an era ending.
The Thurso lifeboat may be able to trace its illustrious history back to 1830, but a healthy chunk of its modern-day operations is down to the guiding hand of its outgoing coxswain.
since he joined the crew of the Thurso lifeboat as a teenager in early 1970, he has responded to hundreds of call-outs, from the daring to the routine to the outright bizarre.
His exploits have been rewarded with a long service badge and the Thanks of the Institution of Vellum, an honour reserved for notable acts of bravery.
He was on hand to help prevent a blazing chemical tanker from crashing into rocks at Dunnet Head and to rescue a group of military personnel and their wives when a pleasure boat ran aground. He has lost friends, too, to the cruel sea.
LOOKING back over his eventful career following his retirement from the RNLI’s most northerly lifeboat station on mainland scotland, this grandfather of two, who turned 65 last month, said: ‘I have no regrets in my life. I loved the job, the crack with the boys and having a £2million boat to play with, of course.’
Paradoxically, for a man who has been at the helm of so many rescues throughout his career, the one thing missing from his final shift was a boat.
The Thurso crew’s state-of-the-art lifeboat was in Inverness undergoing minor repairs and a relief boat would only arrive after his official retirement, which meant there was no chance of a last-minute emergency shout getting in the way of the celebrations marking Wing’s send-off.
It was almost as if someone had planned it that way. ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ chuckles Wing, a broad grin minus two front teeth stretching as tight as an oilskin across his weathered complexion.
It was left to Thurso’s neighbouring four lifeboat stations at Longhope and stromness, on Orkney, and Wick and Lochinver to cover the huge and busy patch between John O’Groats and Cape Wrath.
Ever since coastguard John Morgan was awarded the institution’s silver Medal for braving the January storms of 1830 to rescue the three-man crew of the stricken brig Mary of stornoway, lifeboats have provided a vital safety net for passing sailors.
When RNLI volunteer crews are on call, they must be ready to drop everything and race to the boat station when their pager bleeps.
‘Five minutes after the pager goes off you have a good idea of what you’re facing, but like the emergency services, it’s only when you arrive at the casualty that you have to decide within minutes what your next plan of action is after Plan A fails.
‘It’s not always that straightforward and you are always thinking on your feet.
‘Yachts are often a nightmare, especially small ones where there’s really nothing secure to fix a tow rope onto and the towing cleats are only held on by inch-and-a-half screw nails. I’ve fixed tow ropes round the mast or the whole boat before now. Thankfully, it’s usually only experienced sailors who come up around the North Coast beyond Cape Wrath.’
In March 1999, the Thurso lifeboat played a vital role in averting a major environmental disaster on the Caithness coast when the chemical tanker Ascania – carrying highly flammable vinyl acetate – had caught fire and was drifting perilously near rocks at Dunnet Head.
‘I was crew and it was a very dangerous situation but we didn’t know quite how bad until we were almost alongside and a couple of us were preparing to jump aboard and get tow ropes organised. The whole thing blew and it was a race to get the whole crew lifted off. Three of us received bravery awards. That was quite a hairy one.’
sadly, though, even experienced captains have fallen foul of rogue storms that can whip up the Firth into an apocalyptic frenzy.
In January 2015, distressing images of the Cypriot-registered cement carrier Cemfjord were beamed around the world after freak conditions caused it to capsize, leaving its upturned hull bobbing briefly in the freezing waters before slipping to the seabed below.
It quickly became clear that all hope of rescuing its crew of seven Poles and a Filipino had evaporated.
No bodies were ever recovered, and the ship has been left as a sea grave.
such disasters are keenly felt in a coastal community such as scrabster, which has always made its living from the sea. ‘You get a wee bit of a lump in your throat when you know there are people inside a boat and obviously we were pretty sure they would have been all drowned,’ adds Wing softly.
The pain goes even deeper when the victims are friends. In March 1984, the Thurso lifeboat undertook an exhausting 48-hour search for the crew of locally registered fishing boat the shearwater, which later changed from a rescue to a recovery mission. Only two of the three crew members’ bodies were recovered.
Wing still finds it hard to talk about it all these years later. ‘That was a difficult time, scrabster’s only a small village and two of the boys were from the village. It affected us all deeply. They were friends, people we knew well. It was horrendous, though…’
In the days before grief counselling, he said the lifeboat men operated by the principle that you got on with bringing the bodies ashore, adding: ‘You can think about it later. Crack open a bottle of something or whatever. That was how we dealt with things.’
HE first became involved with the lifeboats as an 18-year-old fresh out of school. He said: ‘When we were young, my friends and I would go over to the lifeboat shed and just hang around with the mechanic. My father, Duncan, was the assistant harbourmaster down here at scrabster and we stayed along at the end of the pier.
‘After school, I started going on the fishing boats, working out of scrabster. We were down at the station all the time doing exercises and all that and I just thought, “Right, well, I’m just putting a little bit back into the fishing community here”. As a fisherman myself, you never knew when you might need the RNLI.’
In those days, there were no pagers or mobiles and the crew was ad hoc. He said: ‘Anybody who was
roaming around the pier, it was just a case of, “Right, we’re going, you’re coming, in that shed, gear on and on the boat”. Now, everybody’s highly trained before they even get on that boat.’
He has witnessed many changes in the lifeboat operation at Scrabster: ‘There have been massive changes in safety, performance and comfort since the first boat I was on. I remember that even when we were inside we used to get wet. It would have been about 150 horsepower with a top speed of 8-9 knots and we would be sitting with water up to our knees.
‘Today’s boat, The Taylors, is a Severn-class lifeboat with 1,200 horsepower and a top speed of 28 knots.
‘It is fitted with satnav and mobile phones and you are sitting in spring-loaded chairs with straps and when the doors shut you are completely sealed in, the heaters are on and you are lovely and cosy.’
Despite all that comfort and years of experience, he still admits to losing his sea legs: ‘I have been seasick. Sometimes it can be the adrenaline on a shout which can be very high at times, sometimes the old choppy water might have an effect.’
That queasy feeling arose four years ago on one of his strangest call-outs, when reports came in of someone apparently drowning in Scrabster Bay.
‘It turned out to be a dead bull, who had obviously died some time before and floated back to the surface. Despite our best efforts, he just refused to sink. We managed to get a rope on him and towed him away from prying eyes beyond Holborn Head.
‘We could see the local ferry coming from Orkney full of passengers so we put the foot down as hard as we could when he burst.
‘The smell was indescribable but at least he did finally sink. Needless to say teatime was cancelled that night.’
More straightforward was the rescue of six military personnel and their wives from rocks off Stroma island after their tourist boat ran aground in July, 2011. ‘They were heading into cliffs called The Gloop through a tunnel, but they hadn’t got the tide right and the boat got stuck. ‘I think the oldest was a colonel or general in his fifties but they did everything right. Their military training and survival knowledge helped, although the women were worried. It was a good one for us, because they were sitting waiting to be picked up and we were just a ferry. But they were very appreciative.’
WING – his real first name is Bill but he is universally known by the unfathomable nickname bestowed by an uncle when he was a youngster – was promoted from second cox to coxswain in 2002. His own brother, Dougie, stepped up to second cox – a major reason, he says, why he has been able to stick at the job for so long. ‘You have to have somebody behind you to provide you with cover and allow you to have time off when you need it. Dougie has been brilliant. ‘He is 59 and has 40 years in the RNLI but he doesn’t want to take over from me. He doesn’t want to go full-time, so it will be advertised and interviews will take place next month.’ As for Wing, a retirement filled with fishing trips and family beckons. His wife of more than 40 years, Christine, 62, has been ‘very understanding’ about the demands of his job. ‘I think she’ll be more worried about me getting under her feet from now on, although it’ll be nice to do a bit more together.’ His daughter Deidre, 40, and son William junior, 39, known as ‘Willie Wing’, both live nearby and work offshore in the oil business, and there are two young grandchildren to spoil. Aside from indulging his fishing hobby, Wing will be keeping an eye on two sickly seagulls, named Granty and Jocky, he has adopted recently. Both birds suffered damaged wings, but are on the mend. ‘Granty comes when I call his name and whistle to him. I can pick him out of the sky too. Jocky’s not faring so well but he’s hanging in there. ‘They are quite the celebrities round here. I don’t know why I started looking after them. After my wife took in our daughter’s cat, I think I became a soft touch for animals.’ Maybe, or it is now just second nature to take lost souls under his wing.