Swanning around
Tall ships and adventures for young and old on the high seas around the Shetland islands
I’ve had some wonderful voyages aboard Shetland’s own tall ship, the Swan. She’s a converted Fifie, 67ft long overall, and the largest of her class to be built here in Shetland. Retired in the late 1950s, she was recognised rotting away down in Hartlepool in 1982, and the Swan Trust was formed to save her. In 1991 she motored back home to Lerwick for extensive renovations, including creating 12 berths around a dining area in the former fish hold.
She’s spent the years since being our fishing heritage mascot around the isles, and our ambassador at Tall Ship events and classic boat festivals. Schools can hire her for a day of short trips, with classes of children coming out to haul up the sails and take a turn on the wheel, or for longer excursions with older pupils – and that was my first experience of being aboard.
We had ten pupils and three staff members along with the regular crew, led by skipper Andrew Halcrow, and we were bound for Norway. We had a rolling voyage over to Bergen, in the aftermath of a gale, and arrived to see that beautiful town magically lit up all round its fjord. We
had a day exploring – including, of course, the funicular railway – and Magnie, the mate and cook, made his wonderful soup whose recipe begins with a quart of cream and a large bag of prawns from the market. After that we motored through the fjords – my first view of them, and I fell in love with their rain-washed beauty.
We set out for Lerwick from Leirvik, in the Sognefjord, and ran into an earlyarriving Force 11 ten miles out from home. It snapped the rudder chain, and we were sheltered from the mountainous waves by a friendly fishing boat until the lifeboat came to tow us in. It wasn’t as exciting as it sounds; the children stayed quietly in their bunks (one even slept through the whole thing), and I was very glad that my husband, who tends to worry, would know nothing about it until he came to get me from Lerwick – and he wouldn’t have, had our headteacher not phoned at the crack of dawn to ask if he’d heard from me...
Another memorable trip was to Papa Stour, a sparsely populated island on the western corner of the Shetland mainland. We spent the night in the silence of Housavoe, and then in the morning motored round to the sea stacks and caves of the north-west corner of the isle, anchored there and launched the inflatable. There was a fair swell running, and Andrew had great fun getting the dinghy poised on the top of a wave to take us into each cave. Inside, the sound of the surf boomed then died away, and left us in a jagged arch of colours, the rock not at all smoothed, but sharp and fresh. One was rose pink, and lower ahead than we could go into, but the eerie ‘oobing’ of seals basking on a beach at its end echoed back to us. The most exciting was a long tunnel, stippled like an Aboriginal painting in ochre, black, white and terracotta. As we went in, it got blacker and narrower as the inflatable crawled through, and then at last there was a narrow column of light that turned into an arch of blue sky and the open sea again.
My most recent trip was to Vementry, Papa Stour again, and Foula. Vementry is right in my own sailing ‘back garden’ but I don’t often land there, so it was a treat to walk over soft turf to the three great guns left over from World War I. Ian, who was mate this time, got busy with the fishing lines once we’d moored up, and supper was fresh mackerel. We visited the caves of Papa, and then went on to Foula, Shetland’s most westerly isle. It was a lovely sunny afternoon, and we had the chance to explore the island, then we did a trip around it to admire the secondhighest sea cliffs in Britain.
They were worth seeing, towering above us, and most beautifully coloured and patterned. One area was splatched as if a giant’s child had had a tantrum with a paintbrush; in another, the sandstone had been knocked away to create an impression of three huge figures standing sideways on, like a bas-relief in an Egyptian temple.
Cuts to Council budgets means that the Swan now depends on the income she can generate through trips, making it hard to know how long she can continue to be Shetland’s maritime ambassador. Ageing boats are costly to maintain, but she’s an important part of our heritage, and her trips are a memorable way to see Shetland!
■ Voyages aboard the Swan can be booked via the website swantrust.com
‘The cook made his wonderful soup whose recipe begins with a quart of cream and a large bag of prawns’