I read about the wreck sitting on a bollard with the gulls screaming above the fish quay. The engines had apparently been shut down due to overheating, the pipe supplying seawater to the cooling system having sprung a leak. They had been used briefly in an attempt to get her past Fiska Skerry, but had generated insufficient power and a big sea had slammed her sideways against the rock. The Ranger had towed her off and got her as far as the East Voe of Skellister, but had had to abandon the tow just short of Vadill of Garth. The engines had been used again to beach her in the lee of the spit. Unfortunately, both the chief engineer and his assistant were in hospital. They were the two men who had been injured, so there was no indication as to whether the overheating had seriously damaged the engines. At least they had not seized up solid.
The most surprising information in the report was that the insurance on the vessel had been allowed to lapse. It was owned apparently by Gertrude Petersen and skippered by her father-in-law, Olav Petersen, eighty-one, who had died of a heart attack during the gale while they were steaming south between Whalsay and the Out Skerries. It was the lack of insurance that had decided the mortgagees to foreclose. 'We naturally presumed the insurance had been maintained,' the manager was reported as saying. 'When we learned that the premium had not been paid we had no alternative.' The amount of the mortgage was not given.
On,the back page, under 'Auctioneers' Announcements',' was a notice of the sale — At the Queen's Hotel on Monday, 31st March, at 12 noon, the trawler Duchess of Norfolk of 190 tons presently lying aground in the East Voe of Skellister, by order of the owner, Mrs G. Petersen of Taing House, East Burra, and of the mortgagees, North Scottish Land and Securities.
It took me the rest of the afternoon to track down the equipment I thought I might need and to establish some sort of relationship with the yards. The smallest proved the most helpful. It was out beyond the breeze-block plant on a dirt road that led to the old gun emplacements on Green Head. The owner, a cheerful, bald-headed man named Jim Halcrow, had been an engineer in the Navy. It was little more than a workshop with no slip and only four men employed. He serviced engines and deck gear, and as luck would have it one of the boats he was working on at the moment was an oil rig supply vessel in for emergency replacement of a fractured prop shaft. 'We'll be going for trials about a week from now, and who's to care if I take her up to South Nesting on test? If I did, an' if we hapt on yon trawler lying afloat, it'd be natural for us to take her in tow, now wouldn't it?' He gave me a broad wink. 'Provided, of course, we're doing the engine repairs for you.'
'How much?' I asked.
'Say fifty for the tow, cash and nobody breathing a word, and the rate for the job on her engines.'
It was a little after six before I got back to the hotel. Fuller was waiting for me in the entrance lounge, a solid man with grey hair and a grey face. He smiled when I asked him if he had found the trawler he was looking for. 'We'll be needing two and with summer coming there's not many owners interested in chartering. I've got the offer of one, but it's old and available only at the end of July. That's too late.' He offered me a drink, and when he had given the order, he enquired whether I was a trawler owner.
'Not at the moment,' I said.
'Your note said you had a proposition.' He had a faintly harassed air.
For answer I handed him my copy of the Shetland Times. But he had already seen it and he knew about the auction. Briefly he explained his requirements: a vessel in commission and complete with crew to act as watchdog to a drilling rig his company would start operating in Shetland waters about a month from now. It would probably be drilling through into the late summer, early autumn; the stand-by boat was required to keep station, whatever the weather, which was why he had wanted trawlers rather than small coasters. 'And we don't want to own them. We just want to charter.'
'I wasn't suggesting you bought it.' The drinks came and I asked him what the charter rate would be. His figure was too low and I told him so. 'You loan me twenty thousand for six months at a nominal 2 per cent and I'll accept the charter at your rate.' And I went on to give my qualifications and the general outline of how I thought I could get the stranded trawler serviceable enough to pass survey inside of a month.
His questions were mainly financial. I think he had been trained in accountancy. He had that sort of a mind and he knew very little about ships. But he was desperate to get something settled. That was obvious when he invited me to stay on for dinner. The reason emerged during the meal. He worked at the head office of a shipping line that had just been taken over by a City finance company run by a man who, as he put it, had a flair for getting into the right thing at the right moment. This man was arriving at Sumburgh next day, flying his own plane, and as soon as he mentioned the name I understood his need to have something to show for the two days he had been up here. Vic Villiers had been acquiring a reputation for the ruthless exploitation of under-developed assets when I was still at the LSE. This was his first venture into oil.
'One of our subsidiaries has a rig operating in the North Sea. The present contract has less than a month to run. After that Mr Villiers plans a crash exploration programme of the two licences we acquired in 1971, both of them licences to drill on the continental shelf west of Shetland.'
I didn't care what their plans were. All I wanted was the money to bid for the Duchess, but when I suggested he take Villiers down to see the trawler tomorrow, he smiled at me sourly. 'I don't think he'd appreciate that. He'll have the chairman of one of the big merchant banks with him and will be travelling on to Unst for a weekend's birdwatching. He's a very keen ornithologist.'
Then come down and see it for yourself,' I said. 'Now, tonight — then at least you'll be able to tell him what the proposition is.'
He was a creature of settled habits and not at all keen on a night visit to a lonely inlet. But he was even less enthusiastic about my coming with him to Sumburgh in the morning and putting my proposition to Villiers direct. He borrowed a torch from the management and half an hour later we were walking the grass verge of the voe. The hills to our left were black against the night sky, the trawler a dark shadow in the pale sheen of the water. I took him out to the spit, playing the beam of the torch over the hull and superstructure explaining again, and in detail, how I thought I could salvage her.
He didn't say much, but I hardly noticed I was so keyed up; a mood of excitement, of elation almost, that I hadn't felt in years. And suddenly I was stripping off my clothes. If Sandford could swim out to her, then so could I, and the desire to stand on her bridge for a moment was urgent and overwhelming. Also I wanted to check the size of the hole in her hull and make certain there was nothing else seriously wrong with her.
'Wait here,' I said. 'I won't be long.'
I think he tried to dissuade me, but by then I was wading naked into the water. It was cold, but not as cold as it had been on the edge of the pack up by Bear Island. It didn't take more than a few strokes to bring me alongside the hull. The torch was rubber covered, virtually watertight, so that I was able to dive down and examine the rent. It was much as Sandford had described it, but the plates were buckled over a wider area. I dived to the bottom, saw that she was grounded at the stern, and then swam all round her, checking the hull. But that was the only damage. I came back to the rent, cold now and feeling tired. I wasn't at all sure I could pull myself up by the rope dangling over the side, and with the hole gaping in front of me, I took a chance and swam through, wary of the jagged edges of the plating.