For Argyll learned yesterday evening that the aerials and transmitting masts from Clyde Coastguard will start to be transferred to Belfast and Stornoway as soon as this Monday 5th November, with those stations becoming fully operational and taking over Clyde duties by 20th November,
While staff have already been leaving, Clyde will remain open in some form until the end of the year as a back up service if the whole catastrophic project goes pear shaped.
The sea areas Firth of Lorne, Sound of Mull, west coast of Mull, Coll and Tiree will now come under the listening ears of Stornoway coastguard.
The majority of shipping traffic in these areas MAY not be affected by this sea change, but smaller craft and especially sea kayakers, who rely on hand held VHF radios for communication, certainly will be.
For 25 years or so I’ve been paddling the west coast of Scotland both personally and professionally. I know most of these sea areas like the back of my hand.
Over the years I’ve come to know the deaf spots where you can’t be heard by Clyde or Stornoway Coastguard and we can’t hear them either.
Last night I spent many hours trawling over charts and maps and revisiting my old expedition logs, working out which sea areas where we kayakers would be most vulnerable. Even with the onset in the last 10 years of mobile phone technology there will be a huge area of coast and open sea where sea kayakers will from now on be, in effect, on their own, with no way of directly communicating with any rescue service.
For the non seafarers reading this piece, I would like to point out the invaluable service that the coastguard offers. Not only do they monitor VHF radio traffic 24 hours a day, 365 days a year saving countless lives, but they put out a weather bulletin every 3 hours with a detailed breakdown of wind, sea states, the overall weather picture and the outlook for the next 24 hours.
I cannot overstate how important this is to the sea kayaking world and, with the loss of Clyde there will be many a time – especially on multi-day expeditions, when we’ll be now putting to sea blind, with no forecast.
With the growth of sea kayaking in the UK, paddlers come from all over Britain and Europe to the west coast of Scotland. Western Scotland has some of the most remote and spectacular coast and open seas in the Northern hemisphere, some would argue in the world.
The financial benefits to local businesses have increased hugely in the last 10 years especially in and around Oban with CalMac ferries being the main gateway to the isles of western Scotland.
I do hope that with the imminent closure of the Clyde coastguard station, lives will not be lost, the marine and shore environments not put at greater risk. But there now a substantially increased chance of all of these misfortunes – and all for what? These cuts are essentially being made to repay the nation’s debt incurred by you and me balling out the banks.
An independent Scotland would find itself on its birth day with coastguard stations in Aberdeen, Shetland and Stornoway – leaving the entire commercial driver of the central belt with its ports of Forth and Clyde and the approaches from the Scottish borders outwith its own control – dependent on a service from Belfast and from the northern part of England.
No one can understand why the Scottish government has effectively sat there and let this happen.
Julian Penney