We’ve talked about the number three in stories. There’s a pattern but something usually changes at the third repetition. When I became a Regular Coastguard, I had to learn Morse Code. It went off the syllabus about a year later but of course ‘dit dit dit, Da Da Da, dit dit dit’ is with you forever. That’s another one you hear on mobile phones now. And for years I’d been formulating Mayday Relays and Pan broadcasts, for exercise or a few times, for real. Even in Routine radio communications the name of the vessel is often repeated three times, until contact is established.
We had an alarm bell in the restroom. Part of the twelve-hour watch system allowed you breaks where you could inspect the backs of your eyes after you swallowed your soup. Your mate gave you a buzz, when your time was up, in case you’d dozed off. But if it was a job, there would be three short blasts. At sea, that means, ‘I am operating astern propulsion’. But, if I was on watch, I would lose no time getting back up the stairs.
Once or twice I entered the Ops Room with the radio pro-word derived from the French for ‘Help Me’ on the air. But this night, no Mayday was broadcast until we put out the Relay. And it was early into the watch. No-one had taken a break yet. We were all occupying ourselves, with the routines. Forecasts and working out the ephemera – like sunset and sunrise times, corrected for our location.
The red light went, on the desk. That was the ex-directory line. 999. Another pattern of three. My Senior Watch Officer tipped me the nod. I took it. He monitored the call.
It was the harbourmaster, Kinlochbervie. ‘It’s the Siller Morn,’ he said, ‘the FR registered Siller Morn. She’s on Glas Leac. She’ll need your team. They’ll need to get a line to her.’
My form had the name SILVER MORN in my printing, with a ballpoint. My SWO had it down as CILLERMORN. Behind us, a multi-track tape recorder stored every phone conversation and every transmission on radio.
The harbourmaster was calling from his home. He had a VHF in the house and he’d heard the boat calling his mate on channel nine, just when he was thinking of turning in. Something in the voice made him listen. It was all low key but he was on the rocks, asking for a hand. Maybe a wee tow off.
I looked at the weather forecast written out on the board. Not too bad. But the tide was falling. ‘What’s it like with you?’ I asked, on the line with the red button. We were sitting the other side of the North Minch.
‘Not a terrible night but the boys are saying there’s a big enough swell running. She’s bumping. We’ll need to get something to her.’
‘Is there another boat close?’
‘The Siller Eve. They work together. Brothers. Sister-ships. They’re talking to each other. I’m hearing them now. They’re up close.’
The panels of switches on our desks selected the different VHF aerials so you could receive or transmit through the same set of headphones. You could never get complete coverage of all the bays and sea-lochs but my SWO selected channel nine on the aerial closest to the scene. There was a very broken transmission. Nothing you could follow.
‘Do you want me to ask them to chop to sixteen?’ the harbourmaster asked.
My SWO shook his head as he dialled up the Hon Sec, Lochinver lifeboat. That’s the launching authority. He requested Immediate Launch.
‘No. Ask him to relay everything he can. Too chancy to chop channel now.’
So I got him to pose the standard questions one by one, the number of persons on board. The life-saving apparatus carried. The weather on scene. We asked him to instruct the skipper to make sure everyone was in their lifejackets.
I could hear the harbourmaster’s voice speaking on his radio set and a crackle in response. The delay was sore. I was still holding on. Gripping that handset.
My SWO rung the team to call them out. He’d written down ‘Glas Lek’. He was on the chart table. I was drafting a Relay. ‘Pan or Mayday?’ I asked.
Right then, the voice came back to me, down the line. There was a notch of difference in the tone.
‘I’m understanding it’s difficult to get at the life-raft and lifejackets. She’s listing now. The tide’s falling away.’
‘Mayday Relay.’
I nodded and wrote it out for the Auxiliary to transmit on sixteen. We should send a telex to the Coast Radio Station so it would go out on the big-set. 2182 kilohertz. Long-range radio. But the red line was our only direct link now.
‘Just keep that line open. I’ll get a lat and long for the Relay. Might need a chopper. I’ll need to call the boss.’
I didn’t have the weight that watch. I was thinking ahead to the order of events, the procedures. My SWO was at the chart table.
‘There’s a Glas Leac, Lochinver,’ he said. Sure it’s KLB?’
I confirmed it with the harbourmaster.
‘Got it,’ he said. ‘Approaches to the harbour.’
I remembered there was also another reef of the same name, out from Ullapool. A hazard of the same name out from each of the three main harbours in northwest Scotland. If you only had the name to go by, you’d be in trouble. The harbourmaster’s voice came back on the open line. I relayed the gist of it.
‘It’s definitely the KLB one and they can’t get right up to him. A hell of a swell. They need to get a line to him.’
I repeated what I heard, out loud. My SWO activated the line to RCC Edinburgh. That’s a military control centre, in Pitreavie, near Dunfermline. He requested a helicopter. Passed the position. The aircraft would normally come from RAF Lossiemouth unless the rescue chopper was already out on a job. It was peak-season for mountain rescue. I heard one end of that conversation too. But I could guess the other. I’d heard it before.
The clear night. The air temperature. The time of year was against us. The Sea King would have to go north about. There was a significant risk in going over the mountains, the direct route. The danger of icing. We didn’t need to do any speed, time and distance calculations for that one.
We all knew it was going to take three hours plus.
‘Time to talk to the boss,’ he said. ‘We could do with a hand in the Ops Room anyway.’
It was going to be a busy night. The scramble was confirmed and the Duty Officer was coming in to give us a hand. Our Auxiliary was putting out the Mayday Relay on three different aerials. Her voice was calm and not too fast. They call them Ops Room Assistants, these days.
‘Five persons on board. Requires Immediate Assistance.’
Other vessels would not be able to offer much help if the sister-ship with a brother aboard couldn’t get close enough. But procedure has to be followed. And there’s an element of luck in what’s in the vicinity. A Fishery Protection Vessel would have a fast dinghy aboard. That could get close. My SWO was driving the telex. I was still hanging on to the handset linked to the red line. Our only link with the casualty.
The Auxiliary was handling the traffic on sixteen. The buzzer on the outside door sounded. The duty officer came through the door. ‘Just carry on guys. I’ll get the picture from the signals.’ He looked at the position on the chart.
As the name Siller Morn was repeated again, on our broadcasts, along with its Fraserburgh fishing numbers, I got a whiff of nausea. Fathers and sons. Willum didn’t want to make it difficult for his loon Andra. He’d a cousin who was pair-trawling and doing ‘Nae baud like, alang wi the brither.’ That’s where I’d heard the name. That’s why I’d recognised it over the crackle of the links in communication.
But the lifeboat was on its way and we could just about talk to him on sixteen, a bit broken. We’d copied his checks with Wick Radio on the big set, 2182. It was quite a steep sea. They were barely making their eight knots. It would be a couple of hours.
The Siller Eve tried firing a heaving-line, from a canister but it blew back in their faces.
The chopper came up on channel sixteen. ‘Rescue 137 airborne from Lossiemouth, best ETA 2 hours 55. I say again ETA 2350 GMT.’
‘Fuck. Will I pass that on through the 999?’
My Senior Watch Officer shook his head again. ‘That’s not going to help them, to know that. Just ask your man to relay that the chopper is airborne. On its way to them now.’
The Ops room settled into an urgent rhythm but under control. I was maintaining the log of actions and times while my SWO followed the procedures of information-flow. The 999 line had to stay open all the time. The radio set in the harbourmaster’s house was still our best link on scene. The boss was informing higher authority. We heard from the coast team on channel zero. It was taking a long time to lug the gear over rocks. They couldn’t get the Land Rover anywhere near. Even with the big rocket, there wasn’t much chance of getting a line out to them.
If you don’t have direct experience of a thing, history can help. The largest ever number of souls rescued by breeches-buoy took place on the Isle of Lewis, not that long after the Second World War. The Clan MacQuarrie tried to outrun a storm by going west of the Hebrides rather than face the short steep seas of the North Minch. She came ashore and all the crew were taken to safety on that tense hawser. There’s a big and a small rocket, to fire a line out to a ship. I was trained to rig at least three varieties of shore-rescue tackle. We’d fired the big rocket on a couple of training courses. Once it had made a sweet arc in the air and another time it had left a strange trajectory.
‘Shit, that would have taken the wheelhouse off,’ someone said.
One member of our course was stationed in Belfast. ‘I hope the boys in the balaclavas never get hold of these bastards,’ he said.
But I was aware of another incident, come to me through oral history. I met up with a man I’d met as a child when the Coastguard depot was on Leverhulme Drive. We were on a search planning course, the days when you crunched the vectors of tides and wind history into an electronic calculator. Computer-assisted planning was to come a few years later. A well-run course left some space for yarns. The man who had pulled my father out from a collapsed bunk on a stranded ship was now an instructor.
As he put it himself, he was in ‘the kiss-my-ass latitudes’ on the run-down to retirement. But he could get his experience across. When he was stationed in Stornoway, a ship carrying salt grounded at Branahuie Bay. Aye, where the Nato jetty is now. He was Officer-In-Charge, on scene. The shore is shingle and the surf was breaking over everything. They could talk to the ship on VHF. He knew they’d never get the hawser tight enough in these conditions. He knew it would be dangerous to pull men through that surf if the breeches buoy was in the water. So this is what he did.
They did get a line out over the ship. Then they kept it simple, got the crew to pull out a heavier endless loop of rope. He asked the Captain, on VHF, to inflate a life-raft and secure it to that line. So it went back and fore, carrying everyone to safety. There was one casualty. It was the ship’s cook, he remembered. A big, big fellow. He’d suffered a heart attack, from the shock. The rest of the guys were fine. They only got their feet wet.
Once all the initial action is taken there’s usually some thinking time. I’d visited Kinlochbervie. I knew our team had a link to a fishing vessel working out of that harbour. If the team had gone out on that boat, with the rescue gear and the smaller rocket-gun, to fire out the light line, we might have had a chance. You could call that the benefit of hindsight.
The crew of the Siller Morn never did get to their own life-raft. The lads couldn’t get hold of their lifejackets. That was before fishermen started wearing suits with insulation and flotation.
Our last message to be relayed asked the crew to get hold of any bit of buoyancy they could. Anything that might help keep them afloat. Anything that would show up in searchlights. I heard the crackling from the radio, over the phone. Still on channel nine.
Then it went very quiet.
I was freed from that phone and took my turn on radio, broadcasting the search area. All communications were now on channel sixteen VHF and 2182MF, as per the book. It was still some time before the chopper and lifeboat were on scene. We went from nine-knot boats to eighteen-knot ones in a very few years. Not soon enough. And this was before RNLI lifeboats could deploy a fast, inflatable boat to get up close when the larger vessel could not.
The chopper, Rescue 137, spotted some of the fluorescent debris in the water, soon after arrival in the search area, as per the ETA. They asked to minimise communications as they sent the winchman down. After about ten long minutes they reported that they had recovered one of the crew from the water.
‘Rescue 137, Stornoway Coastguard. Do you want us to arrange an ambulance to rendezvous? Over.’
‘Coastguard, 137. Channel zero. Over.’
‘Roger. Zero.’ (Channel for dedicated Search and Rescue Units only.)
‘Coastguard, 137 on zero. Sorry but the condition of this man cannot get worse. We’ll keep searching. Conditions are not very good on scene and we don’t have that much fuel endurance. Over.’
‘Roger, 137. Coastguard out.’
A sick feeling in the stomach. You can’t let that into the voice you use on the phone or radio.
So the night went on. Between the lifeboat, the sister-ship and the chopper, all five bodies were recovered. What was left of the Siller Morn slid off the reef and the wreck was quickly broken up.
My SWO attended the Fatal Accident Inquiry. It was judged that all action which could have been taken, was taken.
But my first SWO and mentor, Seamus, had been returning casualty reports for years. They’d often drawn attention to the gap in helicopter coverage on Scotland’s northwest, particularly when there was a danger of icing in the winter months. A survey was commissioned, based on drawing the radius of helicopter response times with reference to probable survival times of a person immersed in water. After that, a contract was awarded, for Coastguard helicopters stationed in Stornoway, Sumburgh and in Lee-on-Solent. They are all still in place. Too late for the crew of the Siller Morn.
The MP for the northwest mainland area, co-incidentally named MacQuarrie, led a successful move to make the carrying of electronic radio distress-beacons (EPIRBs) mandatory for fishing vessels over certain dimensions.
My cousin Willum’s lad, young Andra, was not aboard the Siller Morn that night. He should have been. He’d failed to show up to catch the minibus when it left from The Broch after midnight on the Sunday. As you know, this was only a reprieve.