Ships in the Sound

We seem to see many fewer ships passing through the Sound at this time of year, but that may be explained in part a least by the long nights and murky days. Over the last month or so, most passing ships are ferries, cargo ships, fish-farm supply vessels or fishing boats.

This smart trawler is the Stefani, N265, registered in Newry. She's equipped with pelagic pair trawl nets, and her main catch is either herring or mackerel. Pair trawling, as the name suggests, involves the use of two boats to tow a large net, one of the advantages of the system being that the disturbance caused by the two ships helps to herd the fish into the net. There's more about the system here.

It's good to see local boats working off our shores, and particularly good to see one with a Gaelic name. Reul a Chuain means star of the sea. She's an Oban boat, her registration number OB915. She got into difficulties in Mallaig harbour in August 2010 when gale-force winds threatened to push her onto the shore. Mallaig lifeboat was launched but the crew got her back under control.

This is the Dutch ship Flinterhunze, a 3,300 tonne cargo boat carrying what look like the towers of wind turbines, passing us on yet another mucky day. Painted in an almost naval grey, she's well camouflaged in the weather.

The Valentin Pikul - now there's a lovely name - is registered in Malta. Valentin Pikul was the name of a Soviet historical novelist who, amongst other things, wrote about the convoys, such as PQ-17, which left Scottish ports for northern Russia during the second world war. More details of him here, and there's a much better picture of the ship here.

There are so few ships around that it's almost an event - worth rushing out and taking a picture of - when two of them pass each other in front of us. On the left is Isis. The Diary complains a great deal about ship's names, and at least this one is feminine, but a search on marinetraffic.com produces a list of about fifty vessels of the name. Femininity and originality are essential. Isis is small, at 670gwt, and she's British flagged.

The ship on the right is the Fri Skein. To add to the variety of flags represented this month, she's registered in Gibraltar.

Lastly, pictured from the steep hills to the west of Ormsaigbeg, this is the Kanutta, the smallest of this month's ships at 457dwt, and the oldest, having been built in 1958. She's interesting because she's registered in Togo. Togo? The Togolese Republic is a slither of Africa located on its west coast. Why is a small, old ship like this one, which seems to spend a lot of its time on our coast, registered there - unless their registration requirements are laxer than, say, the UK? Her only claim to fame is that she was the first ship through the Caledonian Canal in 2010, in a scheme to reopen that waterway to commercial traffic, story here.