A steady hand at the helm o

This week we continue with the second part of our feature on the reflections of the Northern Lighthouse Board chairman of the Board of Commissioners Captain Alastair Beveridge before he retires today (March 31). A comissioner for 10 years, Alastair’s connection with the NLB goes back 40 years. Susan Windram caught up with him on board the former lighthouse ship Fingal, now a floating hotel, where, as chairperson at the time of the Northern Lighthouse Heritage Trust, he came across one of the old buoy books.

He said: “[The trust] looks after the history and artefacts of NLB, as well as sponsoring various charities and museums with an interest in the maritime sector and the work and history of the Northern Lighthouse Board.

“I arranged to borrow the book and one of the trustees, who is also a retired NLB master, spent time going through all the individual buoy details and found quite a lot of information that had been lost over the years. This is all now archived with the trust.”

During his time at sea with the NLB, were there any occasions that stick in his memory?

“I do recall, on Fingal, actually, I was on board with Captain Niall Macfarlane – who was a really nice man, very unassuming. He sadly passed away in August 2021 – and we were coming back down towards Oban. I think it must have been about 1984.

“It was a really bad night, north-west gale, stormy, very heavy snow and we had no option but to run down the Sound of Mull and try and get into Oban. There was very low barometric pressure, spring tides, so it was the worst combination.

“Captain Niall left me to take the ship all the way down the Sound of Mull, which was an amazing thing for him to do considering the conditions. Visibility was very poor and snow badly affects radar performance so it was quite challenging feeling our way down the Sound.

“The idea when we reached the bottom of the Sound was to get into Oban but there was absolutely no way we could berth safely in those conditions.

“So the next plan was to spend the night dodging in the lee of Lismore. You find a safe space of sheltered water and just go up and down at minimum speed, but in the conditions, there was no way we could do that. It just wasn’t safe. It was too windy to control the ship at slow speed and visibility was very poor.

“So it was decided the safest option was to anchor in the lee of Lismore until the weather became moderate and because the wind was so strong it would be best to use two anchors. This is a classic seamanship exercise and under normal conditions is relatively easy to carry out. But there was so much wind and snow we could barely see the anchor party on the foc’sle (the deck where the anchors are stowed) and they couldn’t hear the radios because of the wind noise. The wind was causing the ship to shear around quite violently but Captain Niall used this to spread the anchors out and with some imaginative hand signalling from the bridge to the foc’sle the whole exercise went very well all considering. The anchor party were very glad to get back into the shelter of the accommodation and we spent an uncomfortable night with the engines on standby waiting for the weather to moderate.

“By the next morning, the wind had dropped and we made our way towards Oban.

The seafront of Oban was just wrecked. The combination of the very high tide and the waves running right into Oban Bay meant the seas had broken over the sea wall and run into the main street and shops.

“But navigating down the Sound of Mull in thick, thick snow and not being able to see a great deal is still one of the highlights of my seagoing career. It was quite a white-knuckle ride!”

But Alastair says even the routine work was enjoyable.

“I guess overall, the things that have stuck in my mind of my time with NLB is the boat work. Supplying the stations all over the west coast, north coast, Isle of Man and, of course, Orkney and Shetland was still largely done by boat, and the boat crews were fantastic. Very skilled guys. A lot of the knowledge had been handed down from generation to generation. So the boat work was great, one of the great experiences of my life. The helicopter work was fantastic too.”

Alastair moved on from NLB in 1986 after just four years, but he has kept up his involvement with the Northern Lighthouse Board over the years. He rejoined NLB as a Commissioner in 2013 and rose to chairperson of its Board of Commissioners.

The Commissioners of Northern Lighthouses was established by an Act of