Robbie and Janet Davie

©Calum Davidson

Although Robbie Davie was born in Broughty Ferry, his mother’s family – Hogg – goes back at least eight generations in Cromarty. The family moved here in 1970 and he and Janet reflect on their various experiences of working with the sea – or in Robbie’s case, mostly under it.

I noticed something many moons ago: the number of native oyster shells on the beach and never ever a whole one. And there was a substantial oyster fishery once in the firth and unfortunately it was over-fished. The oysters went down to London. This is a subject that interested me. That’s why I started growing oysters, because I knew they’d grow. I didn’t know why they died until much later. There was a severe winter – I’ve forgotten the year, but there was tremendous mortality of shellfish that exist in shallow water, so that’s the source of most of the oyster shells on the beach. They also suffered from an oyster ‘drill’, a wee beastie that drills a hole. Quite often if you pick up a dead oyster shell down there (they’re muckle great big oysters), you’ll find a beautifully drilled round hole in them and that’s oyster drill. And that’s desperate news for an oyster fishery normally but I think the drills can occur at a low level without a lot of damage.

It was about 1979, 1980 when I thought I’d buy a few tiny oysters and see if they’d grow. I had no reason to think they wouldn’t and they grew very well. But I didn’t use native oysters, I used oysters that come from the Far East initially. They’re used all over the world because they’re very fast growing, they’re good acceptable oysters. And they grew like stink. So I thought, let’s buy a few more of them. And so I expanded to quite a big oyster farm. In order to keep them away from this ‘drill’ you’ve got to take them off the sea bed, so you make trestles and you put the oysters in bags from which they can’t escape but which allows water ingress easily and tie them on to the trestles and let mother nature do the rest. You don’t have to feed them – they get what they need from the sea: there’s good tidal movement here and it’s a safe spot.

I bought four small factory units in Dingwall and we worked away – we were selling for 10, 11 years – nearly £1 million a year turnover. We were buying in all sorts of stuff from all over the place as well as our own farmed shellfish but we finished the business about 15 years ago.

I’ve tried to get other people involved because there’s actually pots of money to be made and it’s interesting if you’re that way inclined. And there’s loads of capital available from HIE and the likes but there’s a dearth of enthusiasm, of entrepreneurs. And that’s what’s essential: you’ve got to be wishing to make a bob and not everybody is.

The good thing in my life I’ve discovered is that when conditions are really tough, that’s when you get most fun. When it’s howling gales and people are being blown off their feet and the boat’s almost sinking, that’s when it’s fun – that’s the times you remember.

Once when I was diving for scallops I had a really scary moment. My pal and I were diving in Loch Eriboll and we’d had a very successful day. You fill your sack of scallops and tail it behind you as you’re diving and as it fills up it becomes quite heavy and it becomes almost too heavy to lift to the surface, so what you do – you have a wee bag, so you take your mouthpiece out, you fill the bag with air, you tie the bag to the bag of scallops and up you go. But if you’ve been so greedy that you’ve sucked the last breath of air out of the bottle and then you try to fill the bag and you’re 80ft down…which is exactly what I did – that was a scary moment.

I had a real fright once – out here – we were diving on a wreck of a coaster, out into the firth. It was a sunny day and calm when we set out. We went out in this silly little boat, about 8 miles from Cromarty into the sea. We found our wreck, which had been marked for us by the RAF. We dived into what was supposedly only 40ft of water but the ship had scoured and the thing was about 30ft deeper than that, which wasn’t a problem. What was curious that day was the stratification – the different temperature layers – with completely different life situations in each layer. You could dive and suddenly it was clear and you could see for 50 yards and then you went down another two or three feet and it was solid green algae. From that point of view it was one of the most interesting dives I’ve ever experienced.

Then we went for the wreck – to see what we could pinch, because the thing had been sunk deliberately – it was a wartime wreck and aboard it was a fairly valuable cargo of half processed lumps of manganese. The 45-gallon drums had disappeared, so all we had were piles of these things with all sorts of beasties growing all over them. So I’m diving along here with my pal – and we’d thrown over (I’m ashamed to say) an anchor about 18 inches wide, a wee three-pronged thing that we’d found somewhere – it was flat calm. Anyway I suddenly saw this ‘dust’ kicking up and I thought ‘What the heck?’ and I realised the anchor was trailing loose. So I swam like mad for it, got up and discovered a gale had gotten up – not a clue of that down below. My pal was still down there, totally unaware of what I was doing. I got back, got the boat started and found him, which wasn’t quite as simple as it sounds. All I could see of him were bubbles. However, back we came and that was a very close shave! We were empty-handed of course. Anyway, we’d decided the job was too big for us.

During the war my Dad was off, successfully winning the war single-handedly, so my Mum would come up to Cromarty to be with her family. So we spent the summer here and quite often went to school here as well, and then when my Mum got fed up we’d go back to Broughty Ferry and went to school there of course. When I was a boy, not only did I know everyone in the place, everybody was related and they all knew it. I mean people who were distant relations still realised that you were related. That doesn’t occur nowadays.

I always played by the sea as a boy. My brother and I played on the beach, on the pier, swimming, never away from water. Water’s always fascinated me: freshwater as well as salt. I couldn’t live anywhere unless there was water nearby – I couldn’t live for a minute in the desert.

I decided initially to start trying to grow a few fish in the sea. There were no fish farms of any description on the whole east coast of Britain. The first ones had started on the west. I built a couple of wooden cages along at Newhall Smiddy and put them out to sea and put some trout in them and the first ones we put out there – this was a learning experience – were too small and they promptly died or went through the net even, they were so small. I was impatient to get them in the sea. I ordered another lot and we went and got them from a fish farm at Moniack, near Beauly. I decided I’d take them back in a largish container: a lot of fish about 4-5 inches long, lovely little fat rainbow trout. So I got this container on the trailer, bought the fish, filled the container on the back of the trailer and only then realised that a cubic metre of water weighs a tonne! The whole thing just collapsed! However, we saved that situation; we retrieved the fish, got them in plastic bags which we scooted oxygen into, hustled them back here, into the boat, got them out, into the sea and we had no mortalities whatsoever.

But I had made an error, a mooring error. The cage moved, the nets got torn and the fish skedaddled. This was a couple of years before the famous ‘fish-on-the-beach’ episode! Then I met up with a guy, an estate owner who was growing salmon smolts to put in the sea. He had smolts and nowhere to put them. I had a site and a cage or two so we got together and we put them in and then we decided to build a lot more cages – about 12 wooden ones. And that was quite successful and then we decided that as there was public money available from the HIDB, we’d build steel cages. I think we had 18 big cages and by this time we’d decided to concentrate on trout. The blacksmiths at Newhall built them – a super job – and we pulled them out and moored them out there and when people saw the fish ashore, that was the result of a gale. I was going to say it was a combination of ice and gale but it wasn’t.

The one time we had a real fright and we hadn’t had the big cages in long, we had a very, very cold winter and Udale Bay, as it used to (I haven’t seen it for a long time) froze. And it froze and froze and froze and the ice came further and further out. I thought to myself, ‘when this ice decides to move, it’s just going to take all the cages with it’. You’re talking about 100 acres of ice. That was a definite worry. We actually contemplated getting hold of hand grenades to break the ice, long before it got to the cages, obviously! But it didn’t come near. When it did decide to go it rattled its way along the shore, thank goodness.

The fish that everyone remembers coming ashore were in cages due north of Shoremills. Because of the storm, one cage full of fish was washed up below the Industrial Estate units at Whitedykes. Everybody in the north of Scotland came to help themselves. It was Cromarty’s very own ‘Whisky Galore’. We replaced the whole lot. We were doing the trout fish farming at the same time as the shellfish business. We carried on with the mussels and oysters a lot longer – it was a separate business. If my grandfather had been alive at the same time as I was interested in this, it would have been the biggest oyster farm in Europe because he was a very go-ahead, progressive guy. My grandfather was Bobby Hogg’s father.

Janet Davie: In the beginning I was very involved with the businesses. I tied hundreds of mussel ropes and sorted out oysters – all the horrible work I had to do! I suppose that’s a real link with the Cromarty fisherfolk in the past. I do miss the fish and the business and all that. There was always some sort of excitement going on; there was always somebody here, loads of people about us.

Launching a boat was good fun. Robert and James and one or two more helpers built this boat themselves out at the Smithy – purpose built from aluminium for the mussels. We had a proper boat-launching in the harbour and I smashed a bottle of wine against it, it was great fun – we had balloons everywhere. The first boat that we ever had was wooden and that was just for fun. It had oars but a motor as well. We fixed it all up and we’d go out and sit in the firth on nice Sundays and listen to ‘Lord of the Rings’ which was on the radio at the time.

And one time we went over to Nigg in it to collect cockles and we got stranded! The tide went out and we were there for hours, waiting for the tide to turn. My sister was staying with us at the time and we had her children with us. And they were so worried! And we’d swim off our boat over there. We found this super, deep, deep pool – I think it’s called the ‘Kettle Pool’ – course you can’t really go there now because they challenge you and ask you what you’re doing over there – it’s on the oil terminal side of the jetty. It may not be there any more. I miss having a boat. I miss pottering about.

We both still swim, out at Shoremills. Robert swam end of May to about October in 2006. It’s much nicer in the sea than in a pool. We’re not bothered by the cold. I don’t like not being able to see through the water, though – I don’t like it when it’s cloudy. I like to see where I’m going and I don’t like to swim into great loads of seaweed or anything. Betty Hourston and I used to swim a lot, in the harbour and all over, really. We swam in a thunderstorm once. I would hate to live away from the sea, or by water, anyway. I’ve lived near Weston-super-Mare, so that was the sea. But we did live by a river in Oxfordshire – we’ve always had access to rivers or the sea. I’m hoping I’ll go swimming again this summer if it’s nice weather.