On Thursday morning, Caledonian Macbrayne offered hardly any services on the Clyde, because of fog. There were no sailings from Rothesay or Cumbrae until the afternoon, despite modern navigational aids. The afternoon sailing from Brodick was unable to berth at Ardrossan and diverted to Gourock. In his memoirs, Captain Robin Hutchison recalls how he operated paddle steamer Jeanie Deans in the fog:
“We had to continue to offer a lifeline service to the Clyde ports despite the fog and we did so by ‘dead reckoning’: not much heard of now in these days of GPS and other digital navigation devices. We would run predetermined bearings, at an exact speed (42 revs per minute in the case of a paddle steamer) and for a precise time measured in seconds.
"At the right moment the helmsman would turn to the new course, repeating the pattern over and over until we neared the pier. Over the last few hundred yards we were guided solely by the sound of a pier hand blowing regularly on a whistle, all the while listening out for a fog horn from any other vessel brave enough to venture out.
"We practised setting the courses we would use in the fog on clear days so that, on days when we had poor visibility, we could repeat the manoeuvres exactly ... In all the years that we did this we never, ever had a problem but this was because, at least once a week, with conditions just right, we would rehearse and rehearse, checking timings with stopwatches.”
If the captain of a paddle steamer could operate a service in fog, why is it not possible for Caledonian Macbrayne to do so, particularly with navigational aids undreamed of in the steam age?
Gregory Beecroft,
4 The Shores,
Skelmorlie,
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