Your report on the ongoing shambles with Dunoon's new ferries misses the point completely ("Row over Dunoon's new ferry service", The Herald, August 6).
Any discussion about the viability, reliability or suitability of the entirely inadequate new service is a diversion and a distraction.
CalMac will be happy to be validated by such aimless discussions as the service proceeds to fail – which most informed opinion in Dunoon and Cowal believes to be the goal.
We already know the MV Ali Cat, a pleasure craft from the upper Solent which has been in use on this crossing for some time, cannot operate in a knee-high swell. Its new companion craft, the MV Argyll Flyer, another pleasure boat acquired from an Irish lake, is no likelier to be able to operate in normal Scottish winter conditions – or indeed windy Scottish summer conditions.
No commercial operator would have remotely considered deploying either of these crafts on this crossing yet at the cost of a considerable public subsidy CalMac, an organisation one assumes is familiar with this sort of operation, has inflicted them on the people of Dunoon and Cowal.
For the past 40 years large, comfortable vehicle and passenger ferries have sailed out of Dunoon pier, ferries built to operate in the conditions on the crossing and which had good passenger facilities. Instead there are now a couple of lightweight and unsuitable tubs running off a linkspan (built for large ro-ro ferries to service a guaranteed high level of vehicle trade, at a cost to the public purse of more than £4 million) which entails a difficult scramble along a long, exposed and bobbing slipway to gang planks which cannot be accessed by old people, disabled people and mothers with prams.
The onshore passenger facilities are risible, consisting of a portable waiting room and a toilet situated a considerable distance from where the rapidly diminishing numbers of passengers are expected to embark instead of the heated waiting rooms on Dunoon Pier which were 20 yards from the boarding point.
The effect on the economy of Dunoon, denied the lifeblood of visiting traffic disembarking in the centre of the town, is incalculable.
The Gourock/Dunoon crossing is one of the busiest ferry crossings in Europe. Vehicular traffic has increased 600% over the past few decades yet CalMac, with an absolute determination, set about destroying its best ferry route and probably the only one which could run at a significant profit. The betrayal of the communities of Cowal and Dunoon by CalMac and every subsequent government which acquiesced in this procession of deceit and destruction is a national disgrace.
David McEwan Hill,
1 Tom Nan Ragh,
Dalinlongart,
Sandbank, Argyll.
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