Ships in the Sound

While we're incredibly lucky to live in a house that has a magnificent view across the Sound of Mull, enabling us to watch a steady parade of passing ships, it's always better to see them close-up.  Amazingly, one recent crossing at Corran - a mere three minutes - coincided with two ships passing.

This one is the Dependent.  She's a bit of a mystery.  Go onto the Ship Spotting website, here, and there's a picture of the Dependent, but scroll down and she's called the Fehn Sirius, registered in Antigua and Barbuda and owned and managed by the German Fehn company.  Check the company's website, here, and the Sirius is listed in the 4,000 - 4,500 dwt category - but in her picture she's blue.

The other ship passing that day was the Burhou I, an old friend from the Sound of Mull.

This is the 2,700 gt Kaami, a Norwegian ship registered in the Bahamas, seen from the more usual vantage point of Ormsaigbeg, as she passed Ardmore Point light.  Her design really is for a ship stripped to her bare essentials, functional but hardly an object of beauty.

This creel gear sitting sadly amongst the seaweed and other flotsam near Mingary castle belongs to the Macleans' Jacobite.  One of the 'events' this month in the Sound was the confrontation between the two MacLean boats and the Krossfjord - report here.  The Krossfjord was fishing for sprats but coming dangerously close to the Macleans' creels, to which the masters of the Jacobite and Dawn Treader quite justifiably took exception.

A few days later two other trawlers were in Loch Sunart fishing for sprats using a twin trawl - a trawl net strung between two boats, more information here - and they destroyed creel strings belonging to our two local fishermen.  Picture, taken in difficult light by one of our fishermen, shows the offending boats just before dawn on the 26th November....

 ....and this picture shows one of them as the trawlers hurriedly left the area a few hours later.

OB5 is the Oban-registered Ceol na Mara.  The Diary stands to be corrected, but understands that she was in Kilchoan Bay fishing - with creels - for squat lobster.  Just to her left is the new perch: those good people who spent so much of their time this summer putting it up will be pleased to see that it's still standing and hasn't, yet, been hit by a fishing boat.

The Royal Navy passed us the other day, in the form of M108, the Sandown Class minehunter HMS Grimby.  The Diary yearns to see something a little bigger and more vicious - like one of the new Type 45 destroyers and, in particular, HMS Defender since The Diary's grandfather's last ship was called Defender.  Maybe in 2013.....

Many thanks to Kilchoan Early Bird for the photo of the spratters.