Oban Marina (Kerrera) for sale

[Nick]

From the marina website's News page:

Sad News


It is with great regret and sadness that I have to inform you all that Oban Marina & Yacht Services Ltd is up for sale.

It has come as a result of many issues of which we were unable to control.

Below is a letter to all of our customers and friends written by our Managing Director Mr Peter Weir.

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Dear All,

I regret to advise you that the Directors of The North Ledaig Co Ltd, the parent Company and sole shareholder of Oban Marina & Yacht Services Ltd, trading as Oban Marina, will shortly be offering the business for sale.

Since purchasing the assets of the Marina from the Administrators in February 2012, we have made strenuous efforts to improve the infrastructure on which the Marina relies and have had only partial success. However due to increasing age and family and staff illness we feel that now is the time to hand over to those who can forge an improving future for the Marina, its customers and its staff.

Some examples of our problems are as follows :-

Water.

Gigha, Islay, Jura, Colonsay, Easdale, Mull and Iona are all served by Scottish Water and yet Kerrera, 230m off the mainland still has only spring water supplies over the whole island. To service the proposed new toilet/shower/ bar/restaurant development I have had negotiations with Scottish Water but they refused to consider installing a supply to Kerrera. They would allow me to install a private supply, at a cost of approximately £150,000 but they wouldn’t contribute to the cost or adopt the supply and we could face a further additional cost for upgrading the mains supply along the Esplanade. To provide a partial improvement the Marina are to tap into the spring at the North of the Island to give an additional supply when the farm spring begins to dry and we will continue to use our desalination plant in periods of extended drought.

WIFI

The high speed fibre optic cables have been installed around Oban but enquiries have revealed that the Kerrera high speed access stops at the telephone exchange in Albany Street. The transmission from there will be down the old hard wire cable which goes South down the mainland, under the channel at the South end of Kerrera and then up the island. As this is in excess of 1.5miles any improvement will be marginal. As part of the £142 million high speed broadband improvements the Outer Isles have had new sub-sea fibre-optic cables installed, but to cater for the inner isles, a special scheme has been established by HIE called Gigaplus which intends to beam high speed broadband signals via line of sight radio waves. The Islands selected in this area are Lismore, Easdale, Luing Jura, Islay and Gigha, bypassing and totally ignoring Kerrera located only 230m off the mainland and in line of sight of the BT exchange. It is unbelieviable that this was allowed to happen. We have been promised that a review of the Kerrera service will be carried out but this might not take place until all the Gigaplus selected islands have been serviced.

Ferry

Kerrera has always been serviced by private ferries, either the Dunollie Estate franchised ‘middle island’ ferry or the boatyard/marina ferry in the North. Despite the fact that the middle ferry serves the tenants of the Dunollie Estate, Transport Scotland through the ‘Ferry Review’ sought to grant aid this ferry to the tune of £75,000 per annum and to upgrade the ferry slips with an expenditure of £750,000. The ‘Ferry Review’ decided that only one ferry could be subsidised and the North residents and visitors should use the middle ferry and travel to the north by a new road which has never been built and unlikely to be built due to local authority cutbacks. Although Oban Bay is classified as Inland Waterways Category D, the changing rules for running the ferry after sunset means that the ferry drivers have to be re-trained to Boatmaster standard, able to go to sea, when all that we require is 1 mile across the Category D Oban Bay. However existing drivers are under continuing training and we expect the ferries to run to the normal times with early morning/late evening crossings this season. We have also taken the decision to prioritise boat owners over casual visitors for places on the ferry and notices to this effect will be displayed at the North pier and the Marina Office.

Diesel

Prior to 2012, the Marina had to charter the Calmac MV Eigg at a cost of £500.00 per trip to transport a road tanker to fill the Marina diesel fuel storage tanks. This is no longer possible as the MV Eigg is no longer on active service and the replacement vessel can’t get into the slipway due to her Voith Schneider drives protruding under the hull. We purchased a workboat and for nearly 3 years transported diesel in three 1000ltr tanks per journey without incident. The MCA then determined that diesel was a dangerous cargo and our boat has had to be upgraded to virtually seagoing tanker standard and drivers trained to handle dangerous cargo, all time consuming and at substantial cost. These issues are being addressed and we are confident that diesel will be on sale again this coming season.

All these issues have been emotionally demanding and frustrating to deal with due to the negative attitude and the ‘dragging of heels’ by these important service providers when all we are trying to do is to improve the facilities and infrastructure of Marina for its customers, who are vitally important to the economy of the town. We are making slow but steady progress on most of the key issues.

The Marina in its sheltered, safe, quiet and peaceful location has a future, and some of its historical problems are near to being resolved, but we feel that the time has come to hand over control to a larger organisation with more substantial funds to carry out the necessary developments and improvements and with a much stronger management team who can apply political pressure to address and overcome these unresolved infrastructure issues.

We are selling the Marina as a going concern and hope that you will await the changes with the expectation of an assured and improved future. However we are aware that some boat owners have paid berthing/mooring fees up-front for the coming season and if you feel that you do not wish to remain at Kerrera, we will give either a full refund of unused periods of berthing or storage, or guarantee a pro-rata refund if you wish to leave during the season if you find the Marina does not suit your requirements in the future.

May I thank you for your custom in the past and apologise that despite all our efforts the infrastructure problems were not resolved for such a long period.

I wish you pleasant sailing during the coming season and promise to keep you fully informed of future progress and developments, but please contact me if you require any further information.

I would personally like to thank all of our customers and friends who have supported us through the years. We have all been through our ups and downs and struugled on regardless. I hope that the marina continues and finds a buyer who can fulfill its potential.

kindest regards to you all

Neil, Caren, Graham, Chris and Paul.

[mm5aho]

They have had it hard there. ... and in spitting distance of all the facilities over the bay!
Hope that something useful happens, there's a lack of good spots in that area.
I see Dunstafnage advertising some improvements - a break water from North and some new pontoons?
We had some damage one year from a summer Northerly gale - needed a new pulpit - but some had far worse, even 1 or 2 sunk. The pontoons moved quite a bit.

[Telo]

There may well be other sides to this story, but it just seems incredible that a decent facility run by well-intentioned people with a vision for improvement has been so systematically frustrated by public agencies. Visiting boats bring an economic benefit for Oban so it beggars belief that so many cards seemed stacked against them.

[mm5aho]

"Visiting boats bring an economic benefit for Oban..."

They sure do, and Oban needs all it can get. Those ferryfulls of sailors coming and going with bags of loot and food (and other stuff) between the marina and the town must be worth retaining.

Mind you, I live halfway between Scotland's two biggest cities and cant get better than 56k over copper wires, (have to use mobile phone), so not everyone gets superfast broadband!

[wully]

Sounds like they are worn down by jobs worth fuckwits...

[SteveN]

Mind you, I live halfway between Scotland's two biggest cities and cant get better than 56k over copper wires, (have to use mobile phone), so not everyone gets superfast broadband!

Copper! COPPER!! Luxury. We're still on aluminium here in rural Fife. For a couple of weeks last month we were struggling at 0.01Mb/s which I think is slower than GPRS (which is all we get for a mobile signal..).

[Telo]

Mind you, I live halfway between Scotland's two biggest cities and cant get better than 56k over copper wires, (have to use mobile phone), so not everyone gets superfast broadband!

Copper! COPPER!! Luxury. We're still on aluminium here in rural Fife. For a couple of weeks last month we were struggling at 0.01Mb/s which I think is slower than GPRS (which is all we get for a mobile signal..).

OK, been a long time since I was a field technician with PO Telephones and BT, but I didn't even know there was any aluminium left in the network. I jointed aluminium cables in the 70s ( not in Fife) - awful bloody stuff, very brittle wires and very susceptible to any dampness (even atmospheric if exposed). TBH, I'd assumed that all that stuff had been ripped out and replaced with copper. Certainly should have been IMHO.

[stevepick]

Sad to see, but I felt the owners hearts weren't in it last year. We kept our boat there for the 2014 & 2015 seasons, having had our previous boat broken in Dunstaffnage. I am not sure some of the issues couldn't have been managed a little better though. The diesel supply problems seem strange, diesel must be shipped around the west coast somehow, is there really not a vessel in the Oban area certified to do this?
The issue with having qualified staff to man the ferry at night? Well that's either a simple training issue (simply fixed by training the staff) or, again was there not one single certified mariner in the oban area who could have done the job? The fact that the ferry issue was never sorted killed the Waterfront restaurant's business - we were politely thrown out at startlingly early times throughout the season because staff had to get back to Oban on the last ferry ( at for instance 8pm or 9pm )
The mains water issue is just one of those weird west coast things , I would have been tempted to install the private system , then sell it back to Scottish water when the next drought hit the island. How livestock on the island are kept legitimately watered when the springs start to run dry is an interesting question - do the farms have an unfailing spring?
I do hope its sold on to someone with the capability and cash to set it up properly, Caren worked like a trojan to run the office & admin. With investment and some vision it could easily be a Portavadie type success.

I haven't seen Dunstaffnage advertising, let alone advertising any "improvements" Geoff, what are these improvements? The (mis)management there don't have a good record on implementing announced improvements. I am still waiting for the breakwater pontoon to appear ( announced 3 or 4 years ago).

[mm5aho]

I read about the proposed Dunstaffnage upgrade here..

http://www.gaelforcegroup.co.uk/group/l ... ge-marina/

Galeforce at least are making something of the PR.
We used to summer there for years, but it went downhill with a change of marina manager. One summer we suffered some damage too, from that occasional northerly to which that place is wide open exposed. The whole marina seemed to have moved enough to have to shorten the main gangway!

[mm5aho]

I hear there's 2 other Marinas to have a major upgrade this year, but I haven't yet figured out which ones they are. I suspect that Gigha completion might be one, but sort of disappointed that this might include pontoons - spoil the place a little. Are pontoons required there - could almost walk ashore!

[Aja]

Are pontoons required there - could almost walk ashore!

Don't think it matters whether the pontoons are required or not. Talking to the chap who is meant to be running the landing area last summer, whilst waiting for the contractors 'to get on with it...' he said that it would bring in a lot of money as the pontoons would be well used. I can remember reading either on this forum or on that other place of a forumite asking where he could cruise the west coast by pontoon only as he didn't want to use a dinghy. A curious world indeed.

Donald

[aquaplane]

Are pontoons required there - could almost walk ashore!

Don't think it matters whether the pontoons are required or not. Talking to the chap who is meant to be running the landing area last summer, whilst waiting for the contractors 'to get on with it...' he said that it would bring in a lot of money as the pontoons would be well used. I can remember reading either on this forum or on that other place of a forumite asking where he could cruise the west coast by pontoon only as he didn't want to use a dinghy. A curious world indeed.

Donald

That sounds a bit like Dylan, he would struggle to beach his Centaur and get ashore dry shod at Ardminish, or anywhere else round there come to that.