Born in Shetland, Hamish Gunn was five when his family moved to Cromarty in 1982. He left Fortrose Academy at 16 to attend Glasgow’s Nautical College, after which he worked first in the Merchant Navy and currently with a private company, Blue Water, as Lead Maintenance Technician and nightshift supervisor on board an FPSO in the North Sea.

In Cromarty the sea was all you did – it’s all there was. I mean, we didn’t spend an awful lot of time at home – it’s not like now with PlayStations. We were never at home, me and the boys. If we weren’t in the woods or up at the Forts, we were down on the beach or down at the harbour. But Dad had a strict thing about the harbour: we weren’t allowed there unattended until we could prove that we could swim. So Dad had the ‘Harbour Test’: we had to swim from the end of the harbour to the beach at high tide. Then he was happy that we were safe. But I couldn’t swim. All my pals would be down the harbour and I’d be really upset. Then I went away to Brittany on holiday and learnt how to swim while there. The day I got home, I said “Right, Dad, that’s it, down the harbour now” and did my swimming test. I must have been about eight.

In the summer we lived in the harbour – we didn’t do anything else. We were down there first thing in the morning. We’d have all our stuff for taking crabs out of the water, for shellfish, everything. All we’d do was just swim, all day.

Diving from the harbour ©Calum Davidson

We’d get bits and bobs to eat there, from the shops if we had to, but most of the time we just lived down there, went home at night. Everyone just hung around there, maybe about a dozen of us, all summer, jumping off the harbour. It would have to be pretty dire for us not to be down there.

I remember we went out one time, me and the other guys, and the weather was horrific, appalling, the wind and the swell were really serious. It was actually painful to stand on the sand because the wind was ripping the sand. We thought it’d be good fun in the big waves but the tide was going out and we’d do silly things like jump into the current  – we knew that if you drifted out with the current it’d take you out past the harbour and you’d just swim off the side and go to the slipway, where the Ferry comes in. But that particular day the waves were so big you couldn’t swim at all and I can remember a couple of us were clinging on under the bridge and a couple of the old fellers who always sat on the bench threw the rings down and pulled us up. I always remember the scrape of the barnacles. But that wasn’t the worst of it – it was the hard time we got off them, you know! Rapped round the lug! They sent us home to our parents, leaving us in no doubt that they would know about it. I was scared at the time but it didn’t stop us going back in, just not when the weather was so bad. That was the scariest experience I had down the harbour.

I remember there were a couple of summers, really good spells, and we were getting the Avoch fishing boats coming in during the night. They’d ditch an awful lot of stuff in the harbour at night, including octopus which we never got before. We used to catch them regularly. We’d also be pulling a lot of edible crabs out of the water and there was a gas kettle and we were cooking them up and flogging them to the tourists.

It’s funny, as you go round the coast, everybody calls crabs different names. In Cromarty I would call an edible crab a ‘kai’ and the small green ones you see washed up on the shore a ‘parton’. But if you go further up the coast, up to Balintore, where my wife’s family’s from, they call edible crabs ‘partons’.

We’d be down with masks and snorkels as soon as it was low enough to get in and out of the piles, pulling crabs out. You’d get dinner-plate sized crabs: monsters, cracking-sized crabs in the harbour. You’ve got those piles that were added on during World War I. But you’ve also got the original stone walls with blocks missing and it’s just a haven for lobsters and that sort of thing. Lobsters were a lot harder to catch than crabs because if you stuck your hand in a hole and grabbed a claw, they’d just shed it and disappear. And every now and again you’d look in and there’d be a conger eel. But everybody was always ready for them. I mean we went down with stuff for snorkelling and part of your gear would be a couple of baited hooks in case a conger eel appeared. And it’d be about a two-hour job to try to catch them because you have to coax it out with a fish on a big hook and then you’d have a trebler (a three-pronged big hook) to rip it up on a wire trace – some of them were 6’ long and you’d be dragging them over the piles to get them out and then kill them. And half of it would go to The Royal Hotel and the other half would go home. They were absolutely beautiful to eat – incredibly bony but beautiful white meat, really nice. We used to catch all sorts. And then in the evenings we’d be round by the sandbanks, fishing for lugworm or what have you. At the lowest tides of the year you’d get amazing crabs out at the ‘Clach Malloch’ rock. It was always a big thing to go out there – it’s quite far out.

When I was ten I built a boat. My Christmas and birthday present that year was three sheets of marine ply! I built a wee, eight ft pram dinghy and called it the Bonxie; it was a good boat, built to a design from one of Dad’s ‘Classic Boat’ magazines. And of course we were always on the sea because Dad had a boat – we were always out with him, first of all a Shetland rowing boat with a bow at each end, but then a clinker-built gaff rig with red sails, a beautiful boat with two masts which was quite a hard boat to sail. When my uncle went to the States in the mid 80s he sold Dad his boat: a fibreglass hull, just a breeze; anybody could sail it on their own.

I used to go out on my own in the Bonxie. Dad’s rule was that you had a lifejacket on at all times, and that was it, he didn’t mind – he knew we could all swim. We never went as far as Nigg in it – it was only a rowing boat – but we did get shouted at from some of the rigs. We’d be trying to get in under the pontoons and were sworn at from above! When we sailed with Dad he would tow the Bonxie behind and we’d go over to Nigg, moor, and then row in.

It was really good at Fortrose Academy because at that time they had Sandy Mackenzie (‘Laddy’). He was a brilliant teacher who taught seamanship which, for the likes of the Avochie lads who were at the fishing, was fantastic for them. ‘Laddy’ was ex merchant navy and when they had the Friday afternoon ‘Leisure Activities’, Sandy would run boat-building during the winter (when we made two Mirror dinghies) and then during the summer we’d sail them down at Fortrose harbour. For a summer I was in the Chanonry Sailing Club at Fortrose. It was great to learn to sail properly but I’m not the slightest bit competitive, I just liked to go and do it for fun.

I think I always knew I wanted to be at sea. I thought about the Royal Navy to start with but after going for all the tests I thought it was very ‘controlling’, very strict. I don’t think I’d have lasted two minutes! I knew Robert Hogg and Donald Beauly and Donald’s sister Hermione – they all went into the Merchant Navy. And then a friend of Dad’s told us about Clyde Marine and took us down for an interview because by then I had left school. I was 16 when I went to the Nautical College in Glasgow for three years, sponsored through Clyde Marine. I had a year in College, a year at sea and then a final year at College. I was an engineer – we keep the thing running, keep the lights on.

I’m not Merchant Navy any more, I work offshore. I did a couple of years qualified and then I took a sideways slide onto an FPSO (a Floating Production and Storage Offloading unit): it’s a ship that produces. The platforms that Ardersier and Nigg built are a thing of the past now. I mean, why build something that sits on the seabed for thirty years and then what do you do with it? For a fraction of the price you can convert a ship, float it on top of the well, let it produce, let it fill up with oil and every now and then a tanker comes alongside and you just pump the oil out into it and the tanker takes it away.

The one I was on before, the Seillean, was ex BP. Seillean is ‘bumblebee’ in Gaelic. Most FPSOs are moored; they go to where they are needed and they stay there. On the Seillean we weren’t connected to the seabed. We were ‘DP’, i.e. ‘dynamically positioned’: we used satellites to hold us in position and we would float over the well and had our drill pipe riser which could connect us to the seabed. When the weather got bad or anything happened we could just disconnect in seconds. So this thing, when it was first designed for the North Sea, it would go to one well, fill up, go to another well, fill up and then go back to shore – like a bumblebee going round flowers. But then BP sold it and another company took it over and it was converted for deep water. And that’s when I was working on it, down in Brazil. I was six years on it down there and it’s still there.

The thing I’m on now is only the second FPSO ever made: the Uisge gorm which is Gaelic for ‘Blue Water’, which is the name of the company I work for. All their vessels are called 'Blue Water' in different languages. It’s in the same place all the time – about 200 miles east of Newcastle - just over an hour in a chopper from Aberdeen. I’m the senior/lead Maintenance Tech, managing and maintaining all of the machinery onboard, to supply power everywhere, keep the lights on and keep us producing. I’m on permanent nights but you get used to it. I absolutely love my job; it’s just being away that’s not good.

It’s amazing that I don’t have a boat. I want to get my kids on the sea, give

Harbour wildlife © Calum Davidson

them the opportunities I had. There’s so much there. I’ve seen some pretty hairy things at sea and it is incredibly powerful, but everything in it is absolutely amazing. So many people don’t realise, even down in Cromarty harbour, that there’s so much wildlife there. People probably think there’s a couple of crabs, a couple of shellfish under there, but really there’s so much more. Cromarty harbour is fantastic.

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