Nancy Glen families can now find peace
IT WAS a poignant sight. The Nancy Glen, its hull faded and rusty, winched from the depths of Loch Fyne after several months on the seabed. That it happened at all was a miracle. When the prawn trawler sank on a cold night in January, taking with it its skipper, Duncan MacDougall and crewman Przemek Krawczyk (a third crew member, John Miller, survived, rescued by a passing ferry), the Marine Accident Investigation Branch announced it had no plans to raise the wreck.
Locals were horrified. In a small community like Argyll, particularly in towns such as Tarbert that have been hewn from the salt of the sea, fishing is a part of life, and death.
When men are lost, and their remains can be recovered, it is a duty to bring them home.
The trawler was not just a wreck but a coffin, the little buoy that marked the place she had sunk beneath the waves visible to everyone driving in and out of Tarbert.
And so the community swung into action. The Clyde Fishermen’s Association raised nearly £300,000 through crowdfunding to finance a salvage operation so the bodies could be retrieved. In every bar, café and shop in Tarbert and for miles around, collection boxes heaved with money donated by locals.
Everyone who has ever lost a loved one knows that grief, in all its unalloyed, relentless mundanity, can be unbearable. But most of us have the privilege of being able to say goodbye to the friends and family we have lost, of seeing them laid to rest, in some cases committed to God.
Funerals are as much for the living as for the dead, a chance to say a final farewell with others before we take our grief to a private place.
But they are also about bringing a person home, particularly when they have died in tragic circumstances away from those they love. To deny a family this basic right seems cruel in the extreme.
And so it is to the credit of the Scottish Government that it stepped in to fund the operation and worked with salvage specialists to retrieve the bodies. Much like another fishing boat tragedy – that of the Sapphire, which sank in 1997 in the North Sea with the loss of four lives – the public pressure to bring those men home has borne fruit.
In the face of tragedy, the right decision was made. And two families may now be able to find peace.