And then there were none… Maersk Bentonville and Brooklyn leave Loch Striven

The first of Maersk’s six laid up container ships to leave Loch Striven, Sealand Performance, was dragged off reluctantly to her final working voyage to the knackers yard on a day when it looked as if the world felt for her. Mist masked the signs of her age and the huge black hulk of her bow, looming in such poor visibility, gave her back the awesome potency she would once have had.

With bright warm weather for the intervening three departures – Boston, Beaumont and Baltimore – the world grieved big time on Thursday at the loss of the final two B-class ships. This time it wept as well.

Visibility was little different from the day of Sealand Performance’s farewell but the day of Bentonville’s and Brooklyn’s leaving threw in wind and rain as well.

The six container ships, progressively laid up in Loch Striven since June 2009, have now briskly regained their working lives. As each of the first four has driven determinedly south to bunker and prepare to sail westwards to pick up cargoes of empty containers for the markets of the Far East to export the world’s Christmas presents, they have looked glad to be purposeful.

Over the previous days, the Svitzer tugs gathered at Greenock for this job – four of them, two to a ship, with Bentonville and Brooklyn to be towed off in parallel operations.

Anglegarth and Ayton Cross are based in the Clyde. Ayton Cross had just got back from Ireland’s Corrib Field to join the party. Maltby had come through the Pentland Firth from the Tyne, Musselwick north from Milford Haven.

The day job

Our day begins at 3.30am back on Loch Fyne, getting things together in time to get to Loch Striven for 6.00am for our film leader, John Patrick, to be picked up on the east shore near the ships.

An unexpected jolt is the visual impact of the first sight of the ships, sliding into view north of the Nato jetty at Fort Lamont.  Only two of them, seemingly huddled together, they look, if not nebulous, then diminished in being shorn of friends. They have lost their inside four sisters, so they are farther out in the loch too, less accessible, already more distant.

The sudden onset of melancholia is interrupted by a shout and here, out of the rain mist, comes Captain Fantastic, David Johnstone, Skipper of the raft, in full oilskins and life jacket.

Captain Johnstone has been at the Clan Lamont Society’s current HQ, saying goodbye to its curators, Mary and Jim Lamb and to writer Brian Morton, who has come down the hill from his farmhouse above. Good friendships have been forged through the year long narrative of the ships, the community and Maersk, with Clydeport as the foolishly self-mutilating bad fairy.

John aboard and sheltered under the hood, the raft’s little white workboat, the Baby B, makes its last trip in Loch Striven, back to the ships.

Behind on the shore, we will have no more communication with the ships, with Captain Johnstone or with John Patrick, who is going to have to take it on trust that we will be somewhere at Greenock to pick him up later. He and the other journalists onboard, from London and Denmark, are to be dropped ashore by the Lyrawa Bay, once Bentonville and Brooklyn have been anchored at the Tail of the Bank at the end of their tow.

With the journalists will be Stephen Burt, mastermind of the use of the ships as the location for the BBC’s Mission 2110 sci-fi series for CBBC and  now a sort of honorary member of the raft’s crew.

Shepherding the visitors back to shore will be Kate Sanderson, Maersk’s Head of Communications, who has so successfully led the company’s engagement with the community at Loch Striven and more widely in Cowal and Bute.

Kate Sanderson and Captain David Johnstone will talk to John Patrick on his video report aboard Brooklyn.

Setting up the camera station on the shore, we know none of this yet. Our job is to record the external story, the big picture.

Down to work

As with all such operations, the Clydeport tender Torch is the signal for epic action. She’s always first to arrive on station and always – with her low black barge-like hull, yellow crane, white wheelhouse and red flashes in the wheelhouse roof, buoys and inflatable – looks ready to party.

Then the tugs come down the loch, in line – matt black hulls, mustard superstructures, high glass bridge towers – a magnificent sight, a photograph we’d long waited for – but not today. The wind is driving the rain from the south so turning in that direction to get the shot will ruin the camera gear. Words will have to give you this mind picture.

Tugs are fabulous – the forwards in the shipping game, the scrummagers. Tough, heavy, squat, powerful – they push, pull, nudge, tug – and when they nestle in at right angles to the towering hulls above them, they do look like sucklings but they also look like they’re scrumming down – and they are.

Today, from both sides,  they push the two ships closer together, squeezing flatter the vast Yokohama fenders that buffer ship from ship. The easing of the tension between the ships allows the ropes – the warps and springs that brace and bind them together – to be untied, creating two independent machines for the first time since the raft began. (What’s the collective noun for a group of tugs?)

The Pilot boat, always last to arrive once all the other players the pilot manages are on scene, has already made her appearance, this time dropping off a pilot on each of the two ships.

Bentonville, anchored with her bow facing out of the loch, is to leave first, Anglegarth under her port bow and the big Musselwick astern, nudge-steering and restraining as necessary. Her anchors come up without any problem – a first for these departures. (Torch had to cut Sealand Performance’s anchor chain and abandon her port anchor to Loch Striven in the first exit.)

By this stage the weather is so bad that photography is impossible so we leave our shore station and take the car to raised ground a little to the south. This strategy lets us take shots from inside it, where we can give the camera better cover than the plastic hood the wind keeps snatching away.

Anglegarth and Musselwick slowly edge Bentonville forwards and we keep an eye on the relative positions of the accommodation towers on each of the ships  – the best guide to what is going on when manoevering is slow.

As Bentonville is turned, a surreal image forms in the soft visibility. We seem to be looking at a giant Maersk Push-me Pull-You, a double-ended industrial sized cargo canoe.

Brooklyn is anchored bow to Bentonville’s stern and as the tugs slowly move Bentonville west across the stern of her sister ship, to reach the deep channel, Brooklyn’s bow appears behind her. For a time the lines of ships coincide as if they were one and we see the impossibly long double-bowed invention of the moment.

Then, as Bentonville almost clears Brooklyn, another surprise is revealed. We’ve been keeping our eye obsessively on Bentonville’s progress but now we see that Brooklyn has been on the move as well. Her tugs, Ayton Cross at the bow and Maltby astern have already swung her through 90 of the 180 degrees she will have to turn to be towed out of the loch. (Oh to have been in a helicopter to record this choreography. Dancing JCB’s wouldn’t compare.)

So the two ships are parallel again, both with their engines running but not engaged. Slight smoke from their funnels is the evidence here. In the water ahead of Brooklyn bobs one of the massive cylindrical Yokohama fenders that has dropped from her bow – but is still attached to its line aboard. This is later retrieved.

Both ships continue to be nudged into position to come up on their last anchor, then to leave the loch in line astern. Torch assists with the lift of Bentonville’s port anchor – and it’s done. The two ships exchange single muted hoots in the mist to signal Bentonville’s leaving. A ritual moment. Brooklyn still has some work to do before following.

Bentonville moves seamlessly away under the control of her tugs, Anglegarth ahead in her favoured terrier position, backing away from her charge, tugging at its sleeve; with Musselwick at the stern, nudging her obliquely to keep her head to wind.

Blind to everything but her return to working life in the water ahead, the great ship moves unsentimentally away from us, down the loch that is already part of her past.

Behind her, Brooklyn stops to complete an equally incident-free recovery of her port anchor.

Then she’s off, moving inexorably forwards, looming large in the mist, carrying with her the transient crew of journalists from several countries who, with For Argyll aboard, are there to record the event.

Brooklyn is also carrying Captain Johnstone, who has skippered the raft from the start and who is now staying with the ship for her first working voyage after lay up. She is to go to South Africa before heading also for the Far East and he will be with her now until September.

She leaves us too, moving into the light of the world she was built for. No backward glance as we flash our headlights to note her passing.

We seek them here…

Now we play hide and seek with the ships, chasing them around the south Cowal coastline, catching glimpses of them on passage out of Loch Striven and up the Clyde to anchor at the Tail of the Bank..

First we catch Brooklyn, slipping silently past the Nato jetty near the entrance to Loch Striven, Ayton Cross ahead, towing from her stern.

Then we find her again, emerging finally from Loch Striven, clearing Ardyne Point, with the yachts at Toward Sailing Club to port, rearing on their moorings in the wind. The great hulking power of Brooklyn in the rain mist is quite menacing, set against the perkiness of the little sailing boats.

In the background is the shadow of the Isle of Bute, another community with whom the ships and the crew of the raft built warm relationships.

Then we catch up with Bentonville, barely visible in the rain mist, just beyond the Toward Light at the southeast tip of Cowal already moving north in the Clyde.

A hoodie crow screams farewell – or something more rude?

Further north, we find Bentonville again, almost invisible now and with the legendary paddlesteamer, Waverley, meeting her to port. All these goodbyes are masked with the discretion of the rain mist.

Bentonville is now on the last stretch to her temporary anchorage at the Tail of the Bank until she leaves the Clyde to return to work.

The other side

At this stage we start thinking about making our own way across the Clyde to Greenock to retrieve John Patrick when the journo pack aboard Brooklyn is set ashore.

CalMac’s vehicle and passenger ferry, Jupiter, appears from Gourock to take us across the Clyde from Dunoon – prompting the thought of the political row certain to come when the hapless Transport Minister, Stewart Stevenson, reveals the wrong decision on the future of this economically crucial ferry service.

En route across the Clyde we look south for Bentonville but visibility defeats us. We snatch a piece of passing evidence of the colourful shipping life of this major river (shepherded by the tug Milford, which we had wrongly assumed would be on the team for the Loch Striven exit).

We grab a hot chocolate from the cafe – and we’re already in Gourock, heading now for the James Watt dock, a few miles to the north in Greenock. From here we may be able to see the two ships at anchor and this is where the Lyrawa Bay will bring our disembarked fellow journalists.

We find two other Maersk ships laid up in the dock, Maine and Maryland – Maine with evocations of Sealand Performance about her.

Then, away in the distance, we see Bentonville, safely at anchor.

Her two tugs, the bull-fighting Anglegarth and the muscular Musselwick, are already back berthed in the dock.

Brooklyn is here too, south of Bentonville, her tugs still in attendance. We discover later from John Patrick’s inside information, that her towline to Ayton Cross parted, some way south of the anchorage, hence the delay. The broken line was recovered and Ayton Cross then towed astern from a bow line, as Anglegarth had done with Bentonville. This is evidently the preferred position for the tug’s engines but towing ahead from a stern line makes a nicer wake.

Then the tugs depart and, free from their baggage, let rip for their berths at the James Watt dock. We find a great vantage point and hold our nerve as the massive ships, first Maltby,  bear down on us. As we’ve said before – in our book, tugs are it.

Grooving a familiar routine, they berth without fuss. Close quarter manoevering is their stock in trade and they are the masters.

Then Lyrawa Bay arrives with her cargo of journalists from, among others, Lloyds List, Denmark’s TV2 and For Argyll. She comes alongside the naval tug SD Dexterous and her passengers disembark onto and across Dexterous to wait for transport from the dock.

On the dockside, the first journalists off Dexterous wait for their colleagues and for transport, with Kate Sanderson from Maersk, second left and Stephen Burt, right, Locations and Productions manager for Mission 2110, shot on board the raft.

John Patrick, unused to standing still, shoots off to discover – too late – that he has a walk of a mile and a half to the exit from the dock – and the same again back – carrying the heavy bags of film kit.

Then Ayton Cross, the last tug ashore, sneaks up behind us to come in to berth.

Out at the Tail of the Bank, Bentonville (right) and Brooklyn (left) lie still. They’ll be here until around 12th July, having their hulls cleaned, taking on supplies and undergoing their class inspections. Only then will they leave the Clyde under their own power on their way back into service.

A continuing story in Loch Striven

And off to the southwest, Loch Striven is what it always was, empty, silent, secretive. Little does it know that some of its secrets may shortly be prised from it.

A research team from the University of Dundee is very shortly to make a reconnaissance dive in the loch, to locate some of the Barnes Wallis highballs whose airborne delivery was trialled in the loch.

The Highballs were an early form of the Barnes Wallis bouncing bombs that breached the German dams in the second world war.

This project is one of the legacies from the Maersk ships’ use of Loch Striven. This scoping dive is funded by one of the charitable donations Maersk made to a range of local good causes. It shared between them the location fee paid by the BBC for using the ships to film Mission 2110 and a donation from its own resources.

Dr Iain Murray, who leads the project, has been talking to Dunoon’s Castle Hill Museum about partnership in the project and, if highballs are eventually recovered from the loch, about being given one to add to its collection. At the moment, no museum has any example of a highball and museums are expected to complete to have one.

We will be following this highly unusual and exciting project and, once the last of these two Maersk B-class ships has left her temporary anchorage at the Tail o’ the Bank and then left UK waters, we will publish a retrospective on this complex and, in many ways, positive story.

Postscript

By chance, today an interesting comment was posted to the story we had published calling for resistance to an attempt by a consortium led by Peel Pots, Clydeport’s immediate corporate parent, to acquire Forth Ports, Scotland’s other big central-belt port on the east coast.

That comment which can be read at the foot of the story – Peel Ports’ consortium must not be allowed to buy Forth Ports – serves as a timely coincidental reminder of why we began this campaign in support of the small Loch Striven community.

The retrospective promised above will put this back in the perspective softened by Maersk’s corporate social responsibility.

The photographs accompanying this article are copyrighted to For Argyll by Lynda Henderson.