Gavin Turnbull

Sailor

"My boat, Sea Moss, was built from scratch by my father. When people hear you’ve got a sailing boat, all these assumptions come flooding in – so I actually don’t tell people often. I find the right moment to mention it, and then I quickly say, ‘It’s my dad’s boat and he built it.’

You can divide boaters into two groups: one is yachties and the other is sailors, of which I'm one. Sailors sail and yachties own yachts – they are like floating rugby clubs. They go into marinas. I always anchor in remote places. Because for me that’s the whole point – the escapism.

I’ve always kept the boat where my dad left it near Oban, because it’s about a 3½-hour drive from where I live in Edinburgh. It has access to so many amazing places. I’ve sailed to Ireland. I can sail out to the Outer Hebrides, up to Skye or the Summer Isles. I’ve got a handful of little anchorages that I know I can get to in just a day. I can find a spot that suits the weather. There is an anchorage for every weather condition.

There are places you can’t get to very often, like Kiloran beach on Colonsay, which is supposedly the Queen’s favourite beach. It’s west-facing and exposed to prevailing weather. But I managed to anchor there one beautiful still warm night. There was no one on the beach, just me and my mate and a bottle of whisky, watching the sun go down.

There are things that worry me though. I’m very aware of the plastic issue because I go into lots of remote little anchorages and there are thousands of small coves and bays on the west coast of Scotland that are full of plastic. That’s never going to get removed. That’s there forever. People tidy up their lovely dog-walking beach near where they live, but that’s only a tiny percentage of the problem.

I’ve been sad to see this, and also the massive increase in industrial aqua-farming. For example, there is an island that I used to anchor at, and I don't any more because you can’t look at the island any more without seeing salmon nets. The salmon industry often talks about the fact that they’re raising these salmon in pristine Scottish waters. Scottish waters are pristine, but they’re not pristine where salmon farms are, because it’s industrial and it’s polluting.

When my dad died, it was like, ‘Oh my God, what are we going to do with the boat?’ I just decided to take it on. But it’s been tough to keep it going. There’s a constant conveyor belt of jobs to be done. But I do it because it’s such a privilege."

Fenella Renwick

Seafood chef

"Myself and Kirsty Scobie run the Ullapool Seafood Shack. She’s local to here and I moved up about 10 years ago. Ullapool is such an amazing place, with all the fishing boats and everything coming in and out, and we just felt there was a gap in the market for a place to sell some cooked shellfish. For us it's all about the streetfood thing and making the most of the produce we can get.

We’re lucky enough to be on the coast and have everything at our hands. The guy who does the oyster farm is only a few miles away. We get most of our produce from Kirsty’s partner, Josh, who is a fisherman and gets langoustines and lobsters. Our fishmonger is local to Ullapool and we get our haddock from him. By far our most popular dish is our haddock wrap.

People want to know where the food has come from these days. We can literally point and say it’s come out from there this morning and it’s freshly cooked for you today. I would say, since we started running the shack, I have a lot more respect and awareness of what the fishermen actually do. My husband is a scallop diver and works offshore. When you see the days they go out in ... With the weather because living up here is beautiful but at the same time we can have some wild days – and the fishermen still go out. It’s their livelihoods."

Matt Rhodes

Wild swimming tour guide

"I am always finding new spots to swim on Skye. In season, I take people for swimming tours about five times a week, and on those I swim at least three times, and at most six. My tag line is that there are far better places to swim on Skye than the Fairy Pools. They're a special place, but it’s a lot of hype. So many people there and so many footprints now, that it’s taken away from it.

Just the other day, we went up to a broch near Dunvegan. There’s little jut of land that comes off from the mainland, and, on it, this broch. Just underneath it there’s an inland sea lagoon that gets cut off at the tide, just perfect for keeping a boat in. This lagoon is like a swimming pool.

Everywhere I go, I’ll take ownership of it by swimming there as much as I can. I’ve got this thing where I feel almost 'that’s mine now'. I feel like I’ve not fully explored that place until I’ve swum in the loch that’s there or the pools."

Tommy Thomson

Canal manager

"I’ve been working on the canals since 1987, when I got a job working at Broxburn. Back then, the Union Canal was a remainder canal, with very few boats going through it, and it was on a reduced budget from Westminster, just to keep it safe. When I got the job, though I stayed nearby, I had never heard of the canals.

My job was to carry out maintenance on the canal. Then we worked together to get local funding and went to local government and tried to open up sections of the canal along the way. In 1999 we were given money to reopen the canal. It was very rewarding and challenging times. We were opening up a canal that had been closed since the Beeching days and getting it back to life again. We were working on all aspects of dredging and civil engineering works and new lock gates, and then also bringing the facilities for the customers.

Back in 2004 I worked for a few years at the office for the Falkirk Wheel. It’s an important link between the two canals – Forth & Clyde and the Union. When you think of the 11 locks that you used to have to take from the Union canal down to lock sixteen where Auntie Katie’s pub is, and compare with what we’ve got now. You’ve got a couple of locks on the top, down on to an aqueduct, breathtaking scenery, and then the experience of coming down with two caissons. And, energy-wise, for the beast to rotate round, it’s only the equivalent of flicking a switch on a kettle.

When I first started working on the Union canal, when you walked along the towpath, it was virtually closed up. The only people who would walk along there were what we thought of as the Last of the Summer Wine groups. There were not many boats. But once we opened it all up, it transformed it into a beautiful leisure pathway for people to enjoy. We gave it a new life, and also the communities around about were given a new life, because they were getting involved and seeing this transformed canal that had been stinky, muddy and neglected looking, coming to life."

Joanna Macfarlane

Beach cleaner

"Beach cleaning is really important. I think when the sea dumps it on the beach, you get a chance to get it out of the sea, and if you don’t collect it, then it will go back out with the next high tide and may never then return.

I live in the village of Charlestown in Fife, next to Limekilns, right on the coast. I come originally from Cornwall and I’ve lived my whole life by the sea, which has always been a passion and a love of mine. I’ve seen marine litter on the beach and issues of plastic pollution, but when I came here, five years ago, on to the Firth of Forth, I was pretty shocked by the amount of sewage related debris, microplastics, and larger plastics on the beach. When I was growing up in Cornwall, sewage was an issue. I remember stuff in the sea, but it was more natural sewage as opposed to wipes and sanitary items and cotton buds and all this stuff we are seeing now.

We found that we had river coming through the village that comes from Dunfermline, called the Linn Burn and we discovered that when storm tanks overflow, they go into that river. That’s also happening along the Firth of Forth that some overflow pipes are going straight out into the sea when there’s too much rain.

That’s a major issue because Scottish Water, bless them, have got an old infrastructure and increasing demand with new property development. However, even if it does overflow what you would expect is poo and wee and toilet paper. But what we’re getting is wipes and sanitary items and cotton buds, all made of plastic that will be forever in the sea.

I’m an environmental educator with a business called Wild Planet Explorers. I designed a 3P pledge, made a logo, and then at various events I got people in the households around here to pledge to never throw anything down the toilet except the 3Ps (pee, poo and paper). In Fife thousands of children are doing it, and Scottish Water partnered with me this year and funded me to go into five schools."

Bob white

Salmon ghillie, River Tay

"The biggest salmon I ever caught was 35lb back in 2011. I’ve been a keen salmon fisher since I was about 16 and I spent all my spare time going fishing.When you get into salmon fishing it really takes a hold of you. Then I decided I wanted to be a ghillie and try and give something back – because I’ve caught an awful lot of salmon and I just felt I could impart some of what I’ve learned to other people. That’s what I do now – take people out on to the river and try to deliver an experience.

But the last five years the catches have collapsed. I launched a petition to the Scottish parliament a couple of weeks ago demanding a full stakeholder consultation on the future of stocking salmon in our rivers. Last year was a record low for stocks, and this year’s catch, certainly on the Tay, is going to look similar, if not less. The Spey, the Dee, the Tweed, the Tay, the big rivers are struggling. We’re losing clients hand over fist, who are not coming back because of the lack of opportunity of catching.

The petition was in response to Marine Scotland, who last year published a stocking policy without consulting the stakeholders, people like us, who are at the coal face. Last year, for all the beats that I run, we caught 89 salmon, and we used to get on a good year something like 450. 89 is a pathetic catch for the beats that I’ve got.

The high and mighty say that the salmon stock is all going to return naturally without stocking the rivers. Scientists keep telling us that stocking doesn’t work. But it has worked all over the world. Rivers in Norway that were completely wiped out with disease have been restocked by stocked fish and they’ve come back again. What I’m saying is that it must be a tool for rivers.

The main reason for the decline is that there’s something going wrong in the sea. Going back thirty years ago, the return rate from the sea would be something like 25-30 percent. We’re now down to three percent, and I think that’s possibly due to global warming, the sea temperature rising, the food source moving away.

One of the pleasures of fishing is being at the riverside, the scenery, the running water. That’s part of the experience we deliver to clients. You can point out ospreys and otters. A lot of the people that came last year, from America and all over the world, had never fished for salmon before. And they’re absolutely blown away by the scenery. The salmon is the icing on the cake, if they catch one, but rarely do they catch. But they go away, in any case, just in awe of the place."