They once ruled the waves as the skills of Scottish boat builders sent generations on to the water, helped bring home herring, mussels and oysters, and bobbed between islands, on lochs and down rivers to trade and just for fun.
Down the years the nation’s boat building and repair sector tumbled; boatyards where youngsters once strolled straight from school to learn the crafts of their fathers and grandfathers closed down.
Now, however, a move has been launched to train a fresh generation of boat builders and revive dwindling skills for a modern age.
The initiative comes against a background of a desperate shortage of young blood to fill the boots of ageing boat builders at a time when the sector is facing increasing demand from marine and aquaculture businesses and from revived interests in boating and sailing for leisure.
The University of the Highlands and Islands is set to become one of the first institutions in Scotland to offer a new modern apprenticeship in boat building and repair.
It comes as 32 per cent of marine employees are reaching retirement age
– about half of marine employers expect significant proportions of their workforce to retire in the next five years.
There are also plans to increase the Scottish maritime tourism sector by more than 40% in the next five years, a move that would see increasing numbers of visitors booking boating holidays or enjoying day trips around Scotland’s coastal and inland waters.
Don Mitchell, head of curriculum at Argyll College, which will deliver the programme for the university, said the new modern apprenticeship is in response to growing demand from traditional boat builders and repair yards.
“With more than 2,100 miles 3500km of coastline, Argyll has a rich heritage of maritime activity and still has a vibrant and active industry. Within 30 miles of Oban there are more than 100 marine-based businesses, with six local boat yards employing more than 100 full-time staff.
“Argyll has, arguably some of the most famous sailing and boating waters anywhere, and the expansion of marine tourism and associated support businesses means the local marinas and boat yards are extremely busy places.
“However, the demand for the apprenticeship has been driven by local and national boat building and repair employers who have been increasingly concerned over their ageing workforce.”
Boatbuilding in Scotland can be traced to the Bronze Age, when simple dug-out boats were constructed from hollow logs and used for fishing and sailing on lochs. Dating from about 1000 BC, the 30ft-long Carpow Logboat was discovered in 2001 in Tayside, while a stern portion of a log boat, carbon dated to 1800BC, was found in Dumfriesshire in 1973.
Wooden boats were built and repaired in virtually every coastal community for generations, serving fishermen and helping transport goods from islands to mainland.
The “golden age” of Scottish fishing in the early 19th century saw Fife’s boat builders recognised for the “Fifie”, a sailing vessel fitted with trawl nets that transformed the nation’s fishing industry.
While the Kingdom’s boatyards thrived, traditional wooden boat building in Leith, on the Clyde, at Aberdeen and Dundee gave way to larger sea-faring steel-hulled ships. Eventually, the Clyde shipyards became “shipbuilder to the world”, where tens of thousands of workers built one-fifth of the world’s ships
thanks to yards such as Fairfield’s and Stephen’s on the South Side, Connel’s and Yarrow’s north of the Clyde and John Brown’s at Clydebank.
But while the yards fell silent, a new wave of demand for the boat builders’ skills is being partly driven by a thriving marine tourism sector.
However, there are approximately 100 Boat Building and Repair apprentices in England annually, until now there have been none in Scotland to help serve the country’s 80 current boatbuilders and boatyards.
According to trade group British Marine, 17% of Scottish companies have a skills gap or difficulties recruiting competently skilled personnel for their business, while 31% have “hard to fill” vacancies as a direct result of skill shortages.
At Clydeside Boatbuilders in Govan, where Peter Matheson uses traditional skills to build vessels ranging in size from a 7ft-long dinghy to 26ft schooner – which in one case took just eight weeks from raw materials to launch – there is no shortage of enthusiastic trainees.
But while he is preparing to greet a new intake of six new “apprentice” boat builders at his not-for-profit business, none of them is Scottish.
He said: “I have people from Norway, France, Germany, Denmark, and I want to pass on my skills, but no one from Scotland seems interested in learning.
I am 73, and I won’t be around forever.
"It would be nice to think that people in the future will keep these traditional boat building skills alive, but I believe they have left it too late to start training people now.”
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