The Press and Journal (Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire)
100-year-old fishing boat returns to its home port
Heritage: Vessel calls into Gourdon on return from Portsoy Boat Festival
A 100-year-old fishing boat has returned to the port where it spent four decades catching lobster and haddock.
White Wing ME113, a 33ft Baldie, stopped off at Gourdon, Aberdeenshire, on its way back to the Scottish Fisheries Museum in Anstruther, Fife, from the Portsoy Boat Festival. Maritime enthusiasts gathered at Gourdon for a glimpse of the old boat, a variety of the Fifie lugsail design popular on the east coast of Scotland. It will remain in port until later this morning.
The visit was arranged by the Maggie Law Maritime Museum. Tom Carnie, president of the Gourdon museum, said: “We asked if it could call on its way to Portsoy for the boat festival. We were too late, but the crew called in on the way back.
“We had quite a few people along to see it. There were about a dozen at first, but then lots more people headed down. One or two tourists have been round about it as well. The skipper, Bob Flann, is from Gourdon. The Quayside Restaurant and Fish Bar gave the crew complimentary fish suppers which they appreciated.
White Wing was built in 1917 by Jas Cadger at Gardenstown for John Ritchie, of Whitehills in Banff.
It was owned by the Ritchie family until it was sold in 1953 to Andrew and David Lownie of Gourdon where it fished for haddock and lobsters until the early 80s.
In 1986 the boat featured in a BBC TV programme called The Shutter Falls, filmed in Portsoy. It was about the Scottish herring fishing industry and the life of photographer Robert Adamson, who worked in the area. The BBC paid for the boat to be acquired by the Scottish Fisheries Museum, where it has been painstakingly restored.
It is now sailed to harbour events around the Scottish coast. The boat was at the reopening of the Forth and Clyde Canal in 2001 and the opening of the Falkirk Wheel the following year.