Each summer I spend a Saturday or Sunday with the Harbour staff who helpfully describe me as “a member of the Harbour Board on work experience”.
This has been the quietest season the permanent staff can remember, with the number of visitors well down. Indeed, at one point on the Bank Holiday weekend there was only one yacht on the visitors’ pontoon. I heard how the new pontoon arrangements at Whitestrand seem to have settled in well, perhaps especially the single remote pontoon for tenders (when there were two separate pontoons, people got confused where they had left their tender). The provision to moor slightly larger boats on the Normandy fingers for up to two hours seems to be popular. The Harbour now has a fast rib patrol boat (with a blue light) which should improve the monitoring of speeding.
It was low tide at midday and a whaler waterskiing in Starehole Bay had run over the wreck and removed the gearbox on its 100hp outboard. The skipper ‘phoned the Harbour Office to request a tow. But Harbour launches are not allowed outside the Harbour limits: the skipper should either get himself inside the yellow buoys or call the Coastguard and ask for a lifeboat. He got a friend to tow him inside the Harbour limits and the new patrol boat recovered him to Batson. All in a day’s work.
Some of the Harbour staff are members of the lifeboat crew, so I heard how they had been called to a large fishing boat out from Dartmouth and 7 miles off Salcombe, stood by while a helicopter took off the crew, and watched as the vessel sank beneath the waves. And then, lying like an injured bird in the harbour, was the Belgian sailing yacht which had been struck amidships by a container ship and dismasted. I understood that the yacht skipper, who was single-handed, was asleep below decks. Fortunately it was a steel yacht.
Most of the seasonal Harbour staff are studying at university, ranging from an undergraduate who had just finished his first year in Law, to a Masters who was about to start a PhD in biological science, with everything in between. They make a friendly and skilful team.
Finally, you might like to know that, although this has been a cool and wet summer, the sea water temperature in the Harbour at the beginning of September was 18.1⁰C, which is spot on what it has been for the last few years.
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