MY BIOGRAPHY. |
1. Since then and a bit before that and ignoring the fact that this all sounds like a conflict in terminology, let us go back a little if we may? 2. The harbour authorities got hold of a great swage of public money, to be wasted around the harbour or forfeit if not spent, and no local authority will give back anything if they can help it. So as part of the spend they ripped out our mooring and extended and raised this and that and replaced our side with much better facilities and installed a similar, though not quite as high, set up at the other side and all this, to our amazement, they did throughout the winter and not the summer as was and is standard practice if it will cause maximum disruption. They had to re-do a lot of it again, during the summer, as they failed to take into account local knowledge and cater for water seepage caused by land drainage and rising and falling tides. The people who originally designed it, authorised it and oversaw the specifications still have their jobs and the original contractor, for whom this type of work was their first attempt, they no doubt being related to someone with influence, were not brought back to make it right but a second contractor was paid an arm and a leg to do that. To date there has been more remedial work and there are signs that another failure is imminent but that is by the by. 3. The much-improved facilities attracted a lot of attention and boats that had not previously been able to operate from this area saw great potential. All they had to do was come in, mob handed, and squeeze everyone else out and then it was all theirs and this is what they tried to do. 4. So if things couldn't get any worse at our end of the Harbour, as we tried to operate the boat in a way that it might pay for itself, they did come in and for the last couple of years or more things have been bad. 5. Two independent operators, with individual boats, but working as a partnership and making a living sub-contracting to various contractors working along the coast, salmon fishing, during the salmon season, taking out parties of sea anglers and anything else they could grab and take away from anyone else decided to make a change. 6. The cobbles that had been a nuisance to us had more or less gone. One guy had retired and sold his boat out of the harbour, another had invested in a bigger boat and had gone commercial fishing and the third, the biggest prat of them all, was still there but we felt that on his own he would not be much of a problem apart from the fact that he would probably employ all the underhand tricks he had proven to be so good at. But we were not to be so lucky. 7. The two with the sea angling boats decided that they would sell their boats, which included, much to our surprise, the last remaining coble that we believed belonged to the dick head and they would buy and renovate an old 'Pirate Ship' that had plied for trade, for many years, on an inland lake, in Scarborough, until Scarborough Corporation, on their run down of facilities for the holiday maker, decided to abandon it. This took place during the winter or off-season period and we were secretly chuffed to learn that the dick head would be working with them and that the whole thing would operate from a mooring further down the harbour. 8. So what went wrong? They sailed into Scarborough, amid a lot of publicity, from a boat yard in Whitby, where all the work had been done and brought with them, under the command of the dick head, a twenty-four seater, open decked, pleasure boat to replace the cobble and to take out trips from our end of the harbour. We might have been able to live with that had it not been for two main reasons. First of all our berth was the preferred birth for the larger vessels and so he would work from there and much to our disgust he employed all the dirty tricks used by the cobbles. He would wait unreasonable lengths of time to fill up or even moor the empty boat up and either go off, for a long lunch break, or go down the harbour and tout for his two mates and their Pirate Ship. When we approached the Harbour Master all we got was, 'You all pay harbour dues, sort out your own domestic problems.' Spineless get. The second and more major problem was that the 'Pirate People' decided that our end of the harbour might be more lucrative and so up they came flying their 'Jolly Roger.' and blaring out their 'Sea Shanties.' That now meant that there were three large boats in the one area and they were in and out every fifteen minutes, as being the genuine pirates they were, they hardly stuck their necks out of the harbour entrance before they were back. They, being shallow drafted and very unstable, in my opinion, when out at sea. But at least they could work from the opposite side to us. 9. For reasons, known only to them, they set out their stall, probably because we were taking their customers, according to their weird way of thinking, to block us off and squeeze us out completely. 10. The approach to the births, from the landward side, is via a fairly narrow space between the public toilets on the one hand and the railings of the promenade on the other. They blocked off much of this space with their free standing, advertising 'A' boards and then blocked the gaps between them with their people, thus forcing everyone towards the Pirate Ship. 11. One of them operated the Pirate Ship with a hired hand, on board, to collect the fares. While the other principal, stood at the top of the slipway and touted for the Pirate Ship and the pleasure boat. The Dick head pleasure boat operator, having come up early in the morning to ensure he got on the birth first and successfully block us off, would also tout for both boats, as would also his hired deck hand and another individual hired to tout for them all when the pleasure boat was out at sea. 12. When we were out it was made very clear to all and sundry, by this gang of idiots, that we were unreliable, always breaking down and goodness knows what else and also they ensured that every time we came back our advertising boards had been removed or preferably laid down so that people tripped and walked over them. 13. They were a gang, mob handed and the one man who could have overseen fair play and who made the rules, and knew everything that was going on, the harbour master, did not want to know. 14. Initially the dick head decided, or his bosses did, that he would take out sea angling trips for two hours at a time but when it was quiet and he couldn't get any then he would compete with us and do trips round the bay. The sea angling didn't last long, as with everything else they ever did, they screwed it up by only going out three quarters of a mile and sitting on a sand bank for two hours, well less than that as the time to get there and come back had to be deducted from the actual two hours fishing trip. Sitting on the sand bank was ideal for them because it was only a very short distance away, a good saving on fuel, and on sand they lost very little of their 'free supplied' fishing gear, but it was no good for the seasoned anglers who very quickly latched onto what they were doing and realised that they themselves would catch very little or nothing on sand. So the vast majority of regular sea anglers moved to Whitby where they got a fair deal. The result was our man did more and more of the half hour trips, cut short to get back in before us, or simply laid there, blocking off the birth while touting for his 'friends,' the pirates. Overall they made more money out of the ridiculously short trips on the Pirate boat so when things were quiet all their efforts concentrated on that but they would not pull off their other boat so we could get in, no that was still working, according to them. So bitter and twisted were they all that their hired hands would often threaten physical violence if they thought we were in their way and one day, when it was low water and we were forced to lay alongside another vessel just short of the berth, the owner of the Pirate boat lent over the side of his Pirate Ship and waving a long handled boat hook threatened, in front of a full boat load of passengers and their young children to, 'split my f*****g head open, where I stood, if I did not move our boat so he could get out.' He had more than enough room but that was just the type of people they were and as they slipped past, without our moving, I shrugged my shoulders and said to his embarrassed passengers, 'And you will all trust this man to take you and your kids out to sea?' It didn't do any good but, at the time, I suppose it made me feel better. 15. Then without warning the whole lot was up for sale, they were retiring. All we could do was hold our breath and hope that it changed hands quickly and the next guy might be a bit more reasonable. 16. He was, he is. But having bought the whole lot seems to think he owns the way of operating, as that was how he was told that things were and, of course, he inherited the dick head as the skipper of the second boat and his brain dead way of working things. 17. Throughout, we had been racking our brains and thinking of ways to get out from under, so one day we set off and sailing south we timed a trip down to Lebberston and Gristhorpe Cliffs where there are colonies of Grey and Common Seals on the rocks and Puffin and a multitude of other sea birds nesting on the cliffs. We could do it fairly comfortably in two hours. That is what we would do. Invest in some signboards, fasten them to the wall so that the idiots could not interfere with them and we would only have to contend with the problems, up on the birth, every two hours or so. We also felt confident and fairly safe, as we were the only pleasure boat operating that was licensed and insured to take passengers that distance. 18. Within a matter of weeks the dick head had applied for a license and got it, to carry thirty passengers a much further distance. How an open decked boat, of that type of construction, managed to get what he did and by apparently only putting aboard some extra life saving equipment neither I, nor many others, will ever know. We heard, but could never confirm, that the basis of his application was that it was his only source of income and that with all the competition he needed to carry more and be able to go further. So much for our harbour authority, who I still believe think the boat belongs to him because the guy who bought it had it registered, for licence and insurance, in the dick heads name. 19. So that was it. Up went bigger signs than ours, and they all touted for 'Seal Trips' down the coast. He would be up at the crack of dawn and be first up on the birth. If we had previously chalked up the time of our next proposed trip, he would chalk up his time as being a half hour earlier. If we didn't chalk up a time then he would chalk up his own and simply block us off the berth with his own boat until he filled up. When we finally got up there, we had to start from 'cold' as he had already taken all the available customers that were there at the time. Also the half hour ahead of us ensured that he mopped up all there was when he came back and they included all those that his 'men' had sold advanced tickets to having assured everyone else that we were on our last trip of the day as we were having some sort of problems. If we got out of sequence, the result of the time taken to get a boat load and there was that slim chance that we may get back in front of him, he would cut short his trip, thus depriving his customers of much of what they had paid for and we have seen him back in the harbour in as little as one and a half hours, so they saw little of the wild life. We have also seen him set off in deteriorating weather conditions with no protective clothing on board for his passengers; so what, he gets the money and they come back very wet, see if he cared, he was dry in his wheel house. He also travelled greater distances than even his extended license allowed, thus rendering his insurance invalid if there was an accident but why should he care, he never has before and it is not his boat. 20. At the end of last season (2002) the owner approached us and said he was going to apply for a license to operate a Speed Boat from the same area. We wrote to him, with copies to the Harbour Master, the Licensing Department at the Town Hall and the Harbour Users Association saying that we would not object to that if he undertook to remove the pleasure boat and sell it out of Scarborough. We are, to date, still waiting the outcome and both his boats are currently at Whitby in winter storage. 21. During the 'off season' we considered making ourselves a charity or forming a support and preservation society or something like that. Anything that would enable us to do something that they would not be able to copy and would get us out of the Summer rat race and shambles and allow us to do something worth while. This was not a new idea and we had tentatively looked into it a few years back and we had come across one company that were prepared to enter into an agreement with us whereby they would raise a half million pounds for us. All we had to do was put a quarter of a million pounds up front to finance their publicity and production costs and then when they had sold, nationally and within no stated time frame, five million raffle tickets at one pound each, they would make the draw for a Car or a Holiday or whatever and then send us half a million pounds. That was the business we should have been in and to hell with the boat but at the time we still believed that things would work out and if that was the only way to raise money then that idea was out of the question. 22. However with the assistance of two colleagues we sat down to form a 'think tank'. The principle was simple: to find an alternative way of funding and running the boat. 23. That is not as easy as it seems, as we were to find out but we have stuck at it and after many, many hours of research, enquiries and damned hard work we have formed an independent preservation society. It is called the Scarborough Marine Heritage Society and I don't propose to go into the detail of it here, as I don't think this is the place to do so. However I have agreed to be the founder Chairman until at least we get up and running and can see no harm in mentioning that and also, for those who might be interested, we propose to include a web site that can be found at http://ScarboroughMHS.homestead.com/index.html. |
CHAPTER 56. Since Then. |
MY BIOGRAPHY. |
