The latest round of the gladiatorial sport the Dunoon ferries issue has always been, sees Argyll Ferries in the arena, with much baying for the wrong blood.
Argyll Ferries is the company operating the early-to-late, two-boat shuttle passenger ferry service from Gourock town centre in Inverclyde to Dunoon town centre in Cowal.
The company has been issued with an improvement notice by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, relating to record keeping on the day to day operation of one of its two boats on the route, the MV Ali Cat.
This appears to relate to the recording of weather forecasts rather than the actual weather conditions experienced.
An Argyll Ferries spokesman says: ‘We have received the improvement notice but were disappointed it was issued without any prior contact from the MCA.
‘This is primarily about the routine paperwork associated with the day to day running of the vessel and will not affect the operation of the service.
‘Safety remains our top priority and we are already doing everything we can to maintain our continued excellent safety record on this route.
‘That said, we have a number of issues with some elements of the notice and the manner in which it was compiled and are seeking an urgent meeting with the MCA to discuss these further.’
The axes of aggravation
There are two structural axes in this increasingly hysterical situation, characterised by hollow political posturing on all sides..
The MV Ali Cat, a light, high catamaran, was never the best boat for this route in the Clyde and certainly not for the berthing arrangements currently prevailing. The latter factor is the same for her fellow boat on the service, the MV Argyll Flyer.
This is not to say that the Ali Cat is dangerous or dangerously operated – but in windy conditions and more lively seas it is skittish, uncomfortable, slamming and visually unconvincing.
The second element is wounded pride amongst some local political street fighters in Dunoon, that they were unable to have their impossibly expensive will to see two competing vehicle and passenger services from the town to Inverclyde.
Resistance was always going to be the response when the Scottish Government conceded that it could not carry on subsidising the underused longer route for a vehicle and passenger service between Dunoon town centre and Gourock town centre. This became unsustainable financially, in European Law and in competition law.
This route had been serviced by Caledonian MacBrayne, a government owned company.
The private sector alternative, the much shorter Western Ferries shuttle service from the outskirts of Dunoon to the outskirts of Gourock, mainly a vehicle service but with facilities for passengers, is profitable and has a track record of consistent use.
The Scottish Government’s determination on the situation was correct: that one vehicle carrying service was sufficient, operating with the frequency of Western Ferries and running the short direct route across the Clyde, keeping both town centres unburdened by additional car traffic.
The answer therefore was to give Dunoon a second specialist passenger carrying shuttle service frm town centre to town centre. The commercial and service logic of this is irrefutable – but not in Dunoon where this issue has become distanced from logic and tied to a repetitive chest beating aggression display.
What has aggravated the situation almost beyond repair has been the Scottish Government’s fearful and politically manipulative mishandling of the circumstances surrounding the change of public sector subsidised contract for the route.
This was delayed way beyond need and reason and with the naked strategy of dampening the negative electoral impact of the decision until the 2011 Scottish elections were over.
When the contract decision was then announced, it had gone to a new company, a sister of CalMac’s in the fleet of publicly owned subsidiaries of the publicly owned David MacBrayne Limited, the parent company delivering the Scottish Government’s west coast ferry provision.
That was not necessarily a problem.
The boats assigned to the service were, though – and particularly the MV Ali Cat.
She was already on the Clyde, filling in on this route. The physical mismarriage between her side entry berthing requirements and the inappropriate facilities available had already given rise to incidents with a gangway at Dunoon Pier, quite reasonably causing public alarm. You could say she was a damaged brand from the start and common sense should have realised that.
But she was there and she was cheaper than buying an alternative boat would have been, so in she went.
The second boat bought for the route from Ireland, renamed MV Argyll Flyer, is a better boat in all respects but limited in the same way as the Ali Cat by having to operate in berthing facilities utterly ill matched to those she was built to use. These boats need pontoons. They have linkspan slipways.
The local campaign against the service, focused on the impossible aim of getting a second vehicle and passenger service from Dunoon to Gourock, has unconscionably damaged public confidence in the existing service.
Folk may live beside water but few have any real awareness of the nature of open water. Being on a ferry can never sensibly be expected to be the same as being in a car. This road has a life of its own. Ferry journeys can be safe while being extremely uncomfortable. A rough trip is not necessarily a dangerous trip.
The focus by the local campaign against the Argyll Ferries service has made much of the impact on passenger sensibilities of rougher trips, to the point where it has inflamed – not always honestly, as we have shown – the fears of the local travelling public ignorant of the water and unable to read its motion.
This is irresponsible. There are reports of screaming passengers on occasion. We do not doubt that there have been passages where some passengers have been frightened and have cried out. But these have been aggravated by what is now the expectation of fear.
For much of the time the passages of the Argyll Ferries boats are uneventful but, like the little girl with the curl, ‘when they are bad they are horrid’.
What the Scottish Government should have considered from the outset was the distinction between danger and fear. A public sector service must be safe but it should not require its customers to summon the testosterone for a white knuckle ride.
Argyll Ferries, as a state owned and resourced creation, was brought into this world as a political device and given what desk bound government officials, ignorant of matters maritime, decreed on cost grounds it should have in the way of boats.
This was never going to be good enough.
The solution
We will shortly be looking in detail at the realities of the circumstances governing this service but for the moment, there is an immediate solution which avoids the series of legal impediments any other change would incur during the life of the current contract.
The Scottish Government should, through Caledonian Maritime Assets Limited (CMAL), the publicly owned company that owns and manages the infrastructure of west coast ferry provision, provide pontoon berthing at Dunoon and Gourock – as a matter or urgency. This would leave the Ali Cat to be replaced at the earliest legal opportunity.
If passengers had secure and dry embarcation and disembarcation and the experience of watching smooth approaches and departures of the boats on the pontoon they were built to use, they would be more accepting of the bit in between. The natural movement of water on less good days is something that one lives with – or chooses not to travel on in such circumstances.
People in Dunoon, in the Cowal peninsula, have a choice islanders do not. They can travel by road. They also have a total of five boats serving their daily needs.
For now, the persistent efforts to damage public confidence in the Argyll Ferries service help no one and should stop.
We note that the MCA made no contact with Argyll Ferries on any issues before issuing its improvement notice. This smacks of private pressure brought to bear on the MCA, who should know better than to throw sops to Cerberus.
The travelling public and Argyll Ferries are together in a situation neither can control, squeezed and bullied by competing forces who use each of them as pawns in their own game playing.
The Scottish Government is in every way responsible for creating the situation that the local ferry action group and its supporters have been able to exploit in the rousing of genuine public fear. The former should build the pontoons and the latter should shut up. Both are driven by self interest and both are users.
For the record, we expect neither of these common sense actions to happen.
