As CalMac celebrates, the Kintyre service continues to flounder
WHILE CalMac rejoiced after being awarded a near-billionpound contract to run west coast ferry services for another eight years, a Campbeltown woman read the news in a bus terminal and felt seasick.
Heather Wallace, a nurse at Erskine Hospital, uses the ferry to visit her mother, 88-year-old Maimie McKinven, on her weekends off work and was due to come in via the ferry last Friday.
For the third weekend in a row, the Campbeltown ferry service experienced cancellations, forcing Heather onto the bus.
She said: ‘Last Friday I was in Glasgow bus station on a sunny afternoon reading in the paper about the contract being awarded after our ferry was cancelled. It was not ‘ferry good news’ for us.
‘I phoned CalMac to ask about the cancellation and was told it was the weather but when on the bus, which was packed with people who were also meant to have travelled on the ferry, they claimed to have found out it went to Arran and was being used for extra runs from Arran on the Saturday.
‘I rang on Sunday to check the status and was told there was a high possibility of the ferry not running. I had to be back for work on Monday, so I took the 11.30am bus back.
‘Kintyre people feel we are being made fools of. We have a limited service anyway. If it is a technical problem it should have been sorted well in advance of our summer sailing programme.’
Heather, like many in Kintyre, feels that the Campbeltown route is not as high a priority as other routes on the west coast because it has the A83 as an alternative into the town.
She said: ‘I am really worried about it. I tell people they have to use it but you cannot blame people for using the bus as it clearly is more reliable.
‘Things are really improving in the town, but this could drag us backwards. People are losing faith in the service fast. If people are stranded, there has to be some failsafe like a replacement bus for air services, or people just won’t trust the ferry to get them back to work.’
MSP Michael Russell said: ‘It is vital that the Campbeltown service is reliable and operates to timetable. I have made representations to CalMac in recent days regarding that matter and particularly seeking their assurance that the Campbeltown service will not be treated as disposable when there are problems with vessel availability across the network.
‘The new tender should give an opportunity to increase the number of vessels in the fleet and that will help ensure not just the continuation but the development of the Campbeltown service, which needs a better timetable and greater frequency.’
Councillor Donald Kelly added: ‘The latest chain of events make you question the commitment to this link. I fully understand the frustration being felt by both the public and local businesses and will be writing directly to the powers-that-be demanding a full explanation and expressing my concern regarding the current unacceptable situation.’
A spokesperson for CalMac said: ‘Safety is the number one priority for CalMac. It is up to individual masters to decide whether they are happy to sail or not. To the untrained, conditions may seem benign but there may well be other underlying weather factors – tides, currents, wind speed and direction – which need to be factored into any decision.
‘We understand the frustration of the Campbeltown community but safety of passengers and crew needs to be paramount.’