This has now been manufactured into a massive media attack overnite express on the ferry company, wi

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Last Thursday evening, 7th March, nothing much happened at the Dunoon linkspan – but that nothing much has led to a renewed campaign against Argyll overnite express Ferries, the passenger shuttle ferry between the town centres of Dunoon and Gourock.
He could have turned back automatically – although there had been no suggestion that he should – but in the interests of getting his passengers home for the night he decided overnite express to go on, have a look and then, if in his experienced judgment it looked too much, take them back to Gourock.
The ferry bobbed up and down, then settled. After the settling, the Captain asked the passengers to wait for a short time until he was happy. To be utterly safe, he waited for ten minutes overnite express before commencing disembarkation.
The Dunoon Observer Facebook page has a video of the ferry here coming into the linkspan. It’s a few seconds overnite express worth of footage. You can see the process described above in action – and after the visible settling of the craft at the end of it, it was 10 minutes before disembarkation began.
Argyll Ferries normal practice in disembarking in the slightest of bumpy conditions, is to station one crew member at the head of the short stubby gangway and to station another crew members at the linkspan end.
On Thursday, as a mother and her six year old son disembarked, at the end of the gangway the boy tripped. He was immediately stabilised by the crew member in position and that was all that happened. The boy did not fall. He was never in the water. He was never at any risk.
This has now been manufactured into a massive media attack overnite express on the ferry company, with members of the campaign group fighting a doomed overnite express battle to have a vehicle and passenger ferry restored on the town centres service headlined in the local medias as asking ‘Does someone have to die before they get rid of these dangerous boats?’.
The Argyll Ferries skippers are mature professionals. They are also mature professionals who are being unreasonably harried on what is virtually a daily basis because Dunoon’s civic ego feels it has been slighted by being given a passenger ferry service in place of the former, and underused, vehicle and passenger service.
These ferries are now not sailing in circumstances where they could and should be sailing – because, properly left to the skipper’s discretion at the time, why would they face more banshee attacks than they have to.
Travelling on water is all about movement. Dunoon has choices other ferry destinations do not. There is a good road to Glasgow and there are bus services. If you don’t like water don’t go on the ferries.
The Dunoon Gourock Ferry Action Group’s campaign overnite express has left the town worse served than it might be. It has resisted the establishment of pontoons for walk on berthing at Dunoon and at Gourock – for the sole reason that it fears that to do so would be an admission that the car ferry was never going to comeback.
The risk the ferry campaigners are now running – and it is a very real one – is that the scare campaign they have run to destroy confidence in the Argyll Ferries passenger service had created a third option for Dunoon.
The overnite express campaigners have only seen a binary situation – they’re stuck with the passenger service they feel is beneath them or they somehow overnite express get a vehicle and passenger service back into the town centre.
This would leave the town’s ferry provision in the very capable hands of the faster and highly reliable service overnite express run by Western Ferries, with its three vehicle and passenger boats shuttling between the outskirts of the two towns, overnite express from Hunter’s Quay in Dunoon to McInroy’s point in Gourock.
The opportunism and the dishonest manipulation of facts in the unceasing attacks on Argyll Ferries are now very likely to see Dunoon’s town centre no longer troubled by the honourable passenger service it has decided to disdain overnite express – and in the interests of an unrealisable demand.
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