Ships in the Sound

The Antigua, a Dutch sailing ship, passed us on her way to Longyearbyen, the largest settlement on Svalbard, an island to the north of Norway in the Arctic Ocean.  The Antigua is a barkentine built in 1957 in Thorne, Yorkshire, as a fishing boat, but is now a luxury cruise ship with sixteen double cabins - she's described here.

If square-rigged sailing ships don't end up as cruise ships, they become sail training ships like this one, the Georg Stage, built in Fredrickshavn and now a training ship for the Danish merchant service.   She was motoring as she passed the Ardmore light, but click on the picture and you'll see the crew unfurling the sails.  There's more detail, and some lovely photographs of her, here.

The Bessie Ellen, built in 1904, was originally a West Country trading ketch but she, like the Antigua, now carries tourists - though they're referred to as 'guest crew', at prices which start at £500 a trip.  The company who runs her has one of those infuriating websites which is very pretty but is difficult to navigate, here.

The Caledonian Sky is a 114-passenger cruise ship operated by Noble Caledonia, who bought her in 2009 from the cruise line Hebridean International.  They had two ships, the Hebridean Princess and this one, then called the Hebridean Spirit.  When the company ran into financial difficulties, they sold the Spirit but have continued to run the Princess, a ship we often see off Kilchoan.  Details of the Caledonian Sky are here.

We've seen the Waverley going up and down the Sound several times during the month.  She's the world's last ocean-going paddle steamer.  She isn't as old as she seems, having been built in 1947 to replace a more original paddle-steamer of the same name which was sunk at Dunkirk in 1940.  There's more of her story here.

The Scotia is a fisheries research ship run by the Scottish Government.  Designed in Norway but built on the Clyde, she was launched by Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in 1998.  There's plenty of technical detail about the ship here.

Built in 1991, the Cameron is a multi-purpose work boat - called a 'multicat' - owned by Briggs Commercial of Burntisland, Fife, who specialise in marine environmental work including cable laying, salvage, dive support, undersea engineering, wind-turbine installation and work with the oil industry. They own tugs, barges, cranes, anchor-handling boats and other types of work boats, including the tug Kingdom of Fife, which has featured previously on this blog.  This looks an interesting company; its website is here.

K232 Aquaria, registered in Kirkwall, is one of an unusually large number of fishing boats which have anchored in and around Kilchoan Bay during the last month.  One could understand this if conditions out at sea were rough and they had come in to get a decent night's sleep, but they've been anchoring here during calm weather.