Marsali Taylor
There’s always something rather melancholy about the once proud boats left ashore
There are two boats on the hard beside our marina now that have been left behind. The older one is an open motorboat: Grace Darling, former tender to the Muckle Flugga Lighthouse. It’s Britain’s most northerly, and another of the ‘impossible’ lights that the Stevenson family erected around our coast.
Muckle Flugga is a series of slanted, jagged rocks off the coast of Unst, and in wild weather the sea crashed right over the lighthouse. It’s automated now, and the shore station is a visitor centre for the nearby bird reserve of Hermaness, but in the days when it was manned Grace Darling took the relief keepers out to the Flugga, and brought home the men who’d finished their shift. She was built to withstand serious weather, restored by the late Jamie Johnson, and acted as guard and committee boat at several regattas.
The other is Pattybelle, a 1960s composite Twister who belonged to the late Jim Anderson of Stiva. Jim worked on the south coast of England from a young man; first he raced Finns, then he bought a small cruiser which he and his wife,
Anita, took across to France at weekends.
They retired home to Aith, where Jim was involved in salmon farming. This gave him a wonderful knowledge of our home waters: he’d often point out a tidal rock to avoid, with anecdotes of the folk who’d got stuck on it.
When he saw an advert for a Twister for only £500, he and Anita went to the south of France and spent three weeks aboard. Pattybelle was trucked to England, and then Jim, along with his neighbour and regular crew, Victor, and other nautical friends, sailed her home.
Ah, we had some fun times aboard Pattybelle. Jim was a keen racer, so I’d crew for the regatta, and that spawned some good Jim stories
When someone came up with the idea of a Round Shetland Rally, Jim was game. Victor crewed for him on that stunt too, and I joined them for the first and last legs. The start was from
Aith, as being handy for boats from Brae, Walls and Scalloway, and the plan was to go clockwise (can’t possibly go against the sun in Shetland), up around Muckle Flugga, out to the Out Skerries, down around Sumburgh Head and up home.
Jim and Victor were taking this seriously. No Fray Bentos pies for them! We set off from Aith late morning, and hadn’t reached the mussel rafts at the end of the voe before Victor had the G&Ts lined up on the cockpit roof, with a twist of lemon in each. After that we had best roast lamb and bannocks, washed down by a very nice red. It was a misty day, so Victor got out his laptop, keen to try his new navigation app. I’d just won a palm-sized chartplotter, and wanted to give that a go. Jim shook his head at us. ‘They’ll never work,’ he said solemnly – his view of all modern technology. To his quiet triumph, they didn’t, and we relied on simple chart navigation to get us into the little bay just past the Eshaness light, where whisky was drunk, and the Hamnavoe folk treated us to a serious feast.
The last legs were from Grutness round to Scalloway, then to Aith. It was a cracking sail, with the fleet surging along on great Atlantic rollers, and Peerie Ollie’s regatta cannon brought out to welcome us home.
Pattybelle’s been ashore for, oh, it must be six years now. There’s water seeping through the cover, and Victor reckons the engine is done – it was temperamental even in Jim’s day. Her cabin is as it was built, her sails are probably past it... on the other hand, her Twister hull was laid down before they knew how thin you could stretch fibreglass, and I bet her mast would still withstand a hurricane. We hope some day we’ll see her sailing again.