The week before last, I went north. Loch Striven is one of several sea-lochs near Glasgow. It “belongs” – I put that in quotes as I still can’t see how the sea can belong to anyone, despite the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea – to Clydeport, a private entity that is the harbour authority for the Clyde river, firth and sea lochs. A twenty-minute boat ride from Rothesay, Loch Striven is known for being one of the testing grounds for the bouncing bombs made famous by the Dambusters film. In fact, many shots in the film are archive footage of them bouncing off – or sinking in – Loch Striven. There are still bouncing bombs – or bounced, rather – at the bottom of the loch. There is also a NATO fuelling station, which a boatman told me often illuminates its fuel tanks with bright orange lights, up on the hill, “like for target practice.” The NATO presence around here may explain why my companion, having popped out for a cigarette at 10pm in Rothesay, was followed by the police – first by car and then by foot – for ten minutes or so. Moral of the story: don’t smoke and wear a green parka in Rothesay (unless you’re about 14 years old: hordes of teenagers walk up and down the sea-front at night provoking no curiosity from no-one except me, alarmed at the repetitiveness of their chosen – or only available – social activity).
This part of Scotland – or off Scotland – is a beautiful place, though, despite an alarmingly suspicious security presence. Clear waters, calmness and rolling glens either side. A few whitewashed houses on the loch shore. But I didn’t go for that scenery. Instead, I went to visit six ships that are anchored there, in what the shipping industry calls “lay-up”. A lay-person might call it being “mothballed.” These have been terrible times for shipping. Several years ago, shipping was booming like no other industry. Liner companies were flooding ship yards with orders. Freight rates were good and millionaires were being made. Then in 2007, the freight rate dropped calamitously overnight. Shipyards found their clients could no longer pay for ships. And ships already in existence became surplus to recession-era requirements. There were two choices: scrappage or “lay-up.”
Lay-up comes in three varieties. Hot, cold and warm. There are technical explanations for each of these categories, but for the non-engineer, hot means engines and all systems on, but not moving, and the other two mean something in-between. Cold is everything off. There are six ships on Loch Striven. They all belong to Maersk Line, an enormous Danish company that is the world’s largest commercial shipping line. It is so big, it contributes 15% of Denmark’s GDP. It has an in-house shop called Stargate (after its famous blue and white star logo). It is named after Maersk McKinney-Moller, one of four children of Arnold Peter Moller, whose father, a sea-captain, founded the company in 1904. Really, it’s like a huge global conglomerate called Fred. In the shipping world, I have yet to find anyone with bad things to say about the company. Filipinos, who supply most of the world’s crew, like to work on Maersk ships, because conditions are good. Maersk, unlike many other shipping companies, still chooses to have a sizeable number of its ships fly the British flag – the red ensign – when many other companies have “flagged out,” flagging their ships at registries run under the name of – but often not out of – Liberia, Panama, Mongolia, Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, etc. Maersk is the de facto British merchant navy (the “British Maersk navy,” someone tells me). But the scale of the recession is such that even Maersk suffers, enough to decide to put its ships into layup.
I went to Loch Striven on a press trip organised by the company. We were there to look at the set of a new BBC children’s sci-fi gameshow, Mission 2110, which is being filmed on the Maersk Boston, one of the ships in the raft (the ships are anchored, obviously, and tied together by very thick rope, and so referred to as a raft). When the BBC was scouting for locations, it was thought that an empty container hold looked so unusual – in the relentless rhythm of the shipping industry and just-in-time delivery you hardly ever see a totally empty one – that it could happily serve as the headquarters of the Roboidz, evil robots who want to take over the planet and must be defeated by children getting fuel rods from them. There is now an 80-strong crew, including a couple of dozen children, who live on-board during the week. The ship’s crew have been accommodating (when I asked to see the gym, I found it turned into a schoolroom) and they must like the company, because being stuck on a raft is, even in the gorgeous if wet surroundings of Loch Striven, extremely dull.
The master of the Beaumont, one of two mother ships (its generators supply the other three “daughter ships”) is David Johnstone. His usual ship is the Maersk Kelso, but he took this commission – it’s not clear whether he volunteered or simply followed his contract requirements – and has been stationary since June, when the ships first came up the loch. And there the trouble began. The glens on either side of the loch are sparsely populated, but they are not empty. The ships sit only 500 metres from houses on either side. After the trip, I went to see Mary and Jim Lamb, who run the headquarters of Clan Lamont (as in former Chancellor Norman), in their house. It’s 100 metres from the water’s edge. The ships seem to be directly behind the picturesque Highland cattle grazing on the field next to Mary’s garden. They are very, very close. “We were given no warning,” Mary told me. “One just appeared one day, and that was that.” She doesn’t blame Maersk, though: All the local objections – and there were many, most collected on the pugnacious local site ForArgyll.com – are focused on Clydeport. Maersk says it located its ships where Clydeport told it to, once the company had decided on Loch Striven for an anchorage, and that the position of the ships has been carefully chosen by considering currents and katabatics, a word I was introduced to over lunch in the galley, local winds, in this case from the glens, that can come down and whip up in to a right old frenzy. Not unlike the writers of ForArgyll, who describe Maersk’s efforts to dampen down discord as “a charm offensive.” That is only partially fair, as Captain Johnstone is charming but not offensive. He is well-regarded and well-known in Rothesay, where the ships do their victualling but not their drinking (Maersk runs dry ships, and mariners can’t come back drunk even after shore leave). Maersk has done its best to smooth waters. The Loch Striven residents were invited to a reception on-board – Mary Lamb wore her red stilettos because she said, “it said ‘reception’” – which alarmed the crew waiting for her on the tall and slippery gangway that you climb from the pontoon below. It’s scary even with boots on. The company will donate the BBC location fee to a local charity, yet to be decided (though lifting those bounced bombs was one suggestion).
I am charmed because I love ships, but I can see that you might not want to live with six floating ten-story buildings in front of your house. Mary Lamb is making the best of an unsatisfactory situation. “I don’t like them sitting at the bottom of my garden. They are awful looking things. But they are here to stay. They’re our nearest neighbours so we have got to be friends.” I’m sympathetic to both sides, and think it wouldn’t have taken Clydeport much effort to mollify local feeling. People are sympathetic to the necessities of lay-ups. In a Rothesay restaurant – the same one where a man came up to our press trip party and told us our boat would be ready at 9.30 in the morning, though we didn’t know who he was and he hadn’t made it clear how he knew who we were – the owner said, “they say the recession’s over, but I’ll know it’s over when those ships sail away.” She said it was sad to see them there. It is sad: they are magnificent ships, and they look magnificent sitting in the quiet waters of the loch (above bounced bombs).
After Tunnock’s tea-cakes and drinks on the bridge, where I got nostalgic for my container ship trip ten years ago and anxious to book others, it was ten decks or so down to the engine room. It was gleaming, as you’d expect on a ship crewed by engineers (and one cook) with not much to do. “I do miss the buzz of being at sea,” said Chief Engineer Stuart Underwood. “Here, you can always leave something until tomorrow.” Underwood, like the Captain, is a Scot. He has a small farm in Argyll, a few hours away, but he’s been in the loch for months and not yet got there. I ask him about the environmental implications of the ships (after asking about the sewage treatment, obviously). Most of the world’s ships are propelled by bunker fuel, which is a refinery waste product. It’s only a short step up from asphalt, and just as foul. Ships emit 3% of the planet’s greenhouse gases, along with as much particulate matter as road traffic, according to recent research from the US government agency NOAA. But in Loch Striven, the ships are using low-sulphur fuel. It’s more expensive, but cleaner. After complaints about noise and too many lights, when the ships first arrived, Maersk did an acoustic survey. From Mary Lamb’s front garden, I could hear a faint hum. But I could also get in my car and drive away.
I’m not technically minded, or less than I should be, so I didn’t follow all the technical discussion going on. But I did understand that this lukewarm lay-up poses technical challenges, because it’s never happened before. Though ForArgyll talked of “rustbuckets” arriving, five of the six ships are only a couple of years old. They are here because they’re a victim of a risk that went wrong: They were built to be faster than most container ships, and designed differently (sleeker lines, less cargo space, engine and accommodation decks in the middle of the ship not aft, as is usual). They were supposed to do a shuttle route between China and the US, travelling at over 30 knots, which is a lot. Modern tea-clippers. But that speed requires huge amounts of fuel, and as soon as the B-class – Maersk Beaumont, Boston, Brooklyn and Baltimore – were built, the price of fuel went through the roof. They couldn’t be run at their top speed because it would have cost $35,000 a day. So they never did their intended routes, and they never steamed at their intended speed. And when the recession took hold, they were the first into lay-up. This isn’t the first time someone has thought of building fast container ships: In the 1970s, the shipping entrepreneur Malcom McLean, who gave the world containerisation, built S-level ships that were meant to do the same thing. They weren’t a success either, and were bought by the US Navy.
It is odd, therefore, to descend into the spotless engine room of Maersk Beaumont and find bits of it wrapped in clingfilm. I assume it’s some special ship variety. It is not. “Just the stuff you buy in the supermarket,” said the Chief, somewhat bemused at my curiosity (though not as bemused as he was by my continual questions about sewage treatment aboard). Humidity is a huge problem in lay-up. As is the fact that no-one really knows whether you can switch off a ship with no detrimental effects. Modern ships have ropes and sextants, but the ropes are synthetic and the sextants are plastic. There are charts, but there are also banks of computers. A modern ship is as hi-tech as an aeroplane. It has auto-pilot. It can be steered by a joy-stick. And no-one is sure, after you switch all that hi-tech stuff off, how it will perform when it is switched on again. For myself, says the Chief, a true engineer, there are too many electronics. When there’s an electronic problem at sea, it’s hard for us to see it. When it’s mechanical, we can see it and fix it.
There are other concerns. A sign outside the galley says, “Remember, fresh water is an issue now.” Of course it is. It has to be imported and it’s expensive. Each delivery costs £4000, then £250 a ton. The ships use two tons a day usually, and four times that with their extra BBC crew. No-one wastes water on-board.
We take a tour along the prop shaft. It’s 100 metres long. The Chief says he comes down here sometimes “to think.” I start to think, too, but about the fact that we are now underwater. This is reinforced by Tony, Maersk’s group fleet boss, who, as we get to the end of the shaft, taps on the ship and says, “this is where you’d be cutting through in the Poseidon Adventure.” Ship people think the Poseidon Adventure is daft, of course. “The lights would go off, and you wouldn’t be able to find your way from one deck to the other, let alone up to the hull.” Still, it’s enough to make me feel queasy, suddenly, and glad to get back above the waterline. The Chief seems happy to show us around. It’s a break. He misses sea life. “The ship is a living thing, it’s on the go 24 hours a day. To say this is a graveyard is a bit strong but it’s a totally different environment. I’d rather be trading.
The trip back to Rothesay seems colder, and I’m reluctant to leave the ships, which get smaller and smaller in the camera lens, until they are what they are from Rothesay harbour: six far-off cream boxes rising from the loch, out of place but oddly at home. The next day, in a local shop, I ask the shop-keeper what he thinks of things. He looks suspicious.
“Are you from Maersk?”
No.
“Are you from ForArgyll?”
No.
Okay then. He asks me what I think of them. I say it’s a shame, that they should be trading.
“Why did they put them in front of the houses?”
I say, because it’s the best place because of wind and currents.
He says, “Bollocks. They say they can’t be too wet or too dry but it’s always drizzling on Loch Striven. This is the wettest part of Scotland.” He says someone told him they will be there for years, like the oil tankers were in the 1970s, the ones that rusted away. I say I don’t think that’s likely. I tell him they are fast and modern ships.
He thinks for a minute.
He says, they should be the first ones out then.
I like this.
I like this, too. It’s very hard to write engagingly about these sorts of subjects, and you do it extremely well.