Retired motor engineer Billy Watson is 68. Born in Shore Street, with seafarers among his forebears, he has sailed all the seas in all the weathers round Britain.

My father’s father, James, was a yawl line fisherman who drowned in the Moray Firth some time between the wars. My maternal grandfather was a fisherman too. But I didn’t go to sea at first. I served my time as an engineer at Andersons garage in Dingwall, then drove buses: Highland Omnibuses.

I became the Cromarty lifeboat’s engineer – the only full-time member of the crew – in 1963, in my mid-twenties, and continued until the station closed in 1968. This was the last Cromarty lifeboat, the Lilla Marras, Douglas & Will; she succeeded The Brothers and the James Macfee, and when last heard of was still on the waters – of Dutch canals (see The Cromarty We Knew, by Eric Malcolm).

The Lilla Marras was a Watson Class boat, a 48-footer with a crew of 8; she had two 40hp diesel engines and could make 8 knots. She came to Cromarty brand new in the mid-50s, built in Cowes, Isle of Wight. She was a fine boat, a typical lifeboat. In the five years I served as her engineer the boat wasn’t called out in an emergency, but I kept her ready to sail, round the clock and year round. When she was at sea I operated the engines with my second engineer, Ronnie Winton, with the coxs’n shouting at us, “pull ahead”, “go astern”, and all that.

I would check the boat, carry out the maintenance, at least once a day, ensure she was ready to sail at all times. It would take me maybe a couple of hours. A lot of it was polishing all that brass – all the engine controls were brass. The rest of the crew took that part of it all for granted. We had the district engineer twice a year and the lifeboat inspectors once or twice a year to check things up.

Nearly 40 years later I can still remember the names of many of the volunteers: the coxswain Albert Watson, second coxswain Eddie Scott, second engineer Ronnie Winton, Billie Bathie, Jimmy ‘Mallaig’ Hossack, Willie ‘Skip’ Mackay, Alistair Maclean.

I did occasional runs for the Invergordon ferry/mail boats, the Enterprise and the Endeavour, and overhauled them. They were owned and run by the Lilla Marras’ coxswain, Albert Watson (no relation), son of the famous Captain Watson of the 1930s steamboat, the Ailsa. They were 36ft motorboats with Kelvin engines which never had a breakdown on my runs. They were always afloat except for the annual overhaul that would take just over a week.

On that ferry run Albert was the ‘delivery man’ for all the goods for Cromarty’s shops, and all the booze – barrels and barrels of beer and bottles for the pubs.

I also served as harbourmaster in those years. That was when we had the coal boats coming in, four ships a year, with cargoes of 100-odd tons a time. The fuel was transported from ship to large storage depots in the town, one being what’s now Donald Macintosh’s work shed and another one situated down by the present-day surgery. We used to have coasters coming in too, with sacks of fertiliser slag for the farmers.

Like the harbourmasters before and since I did not wear a uniform. My job was to catch the boat-ropes, tie them up and collect their dues – dues that went into the coffers of the Cromarty Harbour Trust.

When the Cromarty lifeboat closed I carried on till 1970 with overhauling lifeboats from stations all over the country, usually sailing them to, and working on them, at Buckie. I shifted boats all over the place. We used to take a relief boat from one station to Buckie, then take their boat back, then the relief boat to somewhere else, and so on.

Stornoway, Longhope (Orkney), Kirkwall, Aberdeen, Anstruther, Fraserburgh – their  boats came to Buckie. The west coast boats, the Barra, Islay boats, I would take to Sandbank on the Clyde.

Then I was on an experimental boat for a year, the first of the fibreglass fast boats – that was doing valuation trials, didn’t matter what the weather was, seven days a week at sea, to value what the boat was going to do. That lasted for a whole year, going round all the different stations, all round the coasts of Britain. She was known as the 40-doubleO-1. (40-00-1).

So I suppose you could say I was a key man in proving the first fibreglass boats of the kind familiar today, aye. The pay wasn’t good. I got a letter of thanks for saving a guy in a small boat who ran aground off Sheerness in the Thames at three o’clock in the morning. The 40-doubleO-1 had finished her trials, and I was on board while they trained the crew up.

When I finished with the lifeboats I was taken on, together with John Patience from Avoch, as skipper/engineer of the Nigg Yard shiftworkers’ ferry and did that for 13 years, from 1972 to 1984. I sailed five boats in all: the Petersham, the  Reaper, the Queen of Scots, the Sutor’s Last, and finally the Coral Star. They were all diesel engines. The last one, the Coral Star, was a 70-footer with Yankee engines, Detroit diesels, 500 horse-power. She could carry up to 150 passengers.

I’ve no stories about those years, even though I was transporting hundreds of yard workers to and from work. There were a few drunk sometimes. But I knew who they were and they were never any trouble.

It was on the Coral Star, after she had finished her Cromarty-Nigg runs, that I had my one and only life-threatening experience at sea. We were taking her to Arbroath, the skipper and me, when we nearly lost her in a storm. She was filling up with water and kept filling, even with all the pumps going, and the buckets, and when we reached Arbroath the next day we found she’d had her bilge keels ripped off. The skipper didn’t put a May Day out. We were lucky. I thought she’d go down. She was sold to a man called Alec Mann and went back to sea.

I spent my final working years back on land. I finished at Mackays Garage in Dingwall as a heavy maintenance fitter. I started out in a Dingwall garage and ended up back in a Dingwall garage. That’s quite funny. I’m one of those they call Cromarty’s ‘Pier Parliament’ – we gather at the harbour and share the craic.

Do I think that global warming could one day cause the seas to rise and change the face of Cromarty? I always say, life changes, and that’s that. I take it as it comes.

There’s a model of the latest lifeboat, the Severn Class, sitting on a shelf in Billy’s house. It’s not a souvenir of service – it was won by his wife Fiona in a raffle.

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