From this morning, the lifeline Uig-Lochmaddy ferry route will be closed until March. Will the replacement services be enough?
Uig harbour will be closed until March 13 while it has worn infrastructure replaced in order to “safeguard future ferry services”.
As yet another disruption to ferry services in the Outer Hebrides, the closure has been controversial.
The current plans, which will see another two-month closure in the autumn, were implemented after initial talks of a solid six-month closure were met with outcry.
Now, the time has come to see if the change will be enough to prevent damage to Uist’s economy.
Longer sailings for ‘scrappy’ ferries
A new timetable that includes Lochmaddy-Ullapool sailings means that Lochmaddy won’t be completely cut off from the mainland.
But there will only be half the usual number of sailings available, with only one sailing each way per day.
The route from Lochmaddy to Ullapool is also considerably longer. Storas Uibhist chair Mary Schmoller believes this will put yet more strain on CalMac’s ageing fleet.
Ms Schmoller, who has helped lead an independent review into how much money ferry cancellations cost islanders, says she is “not confident” that the replacement services will be able to keep up.
She compared the ferries to a “scrappy old car that always breaks down”.
One sailing a day – at 5:30am
Another concern is that the Uig harbour closure means that ferries now only leave Lochmaddy in the early morning.
The Ullapool ferry will depart from Lochmaddy at 5:30am, or at 6am on Sundays.
That’s over six hours earlier than the usual sailing times. And for the team at Taigh Chearsabhagh, a busy arts centre in Lochmaddy, that change could be a big problem.
Director Simon Hart says that it means the arts hub will lose out on one of its most reliable groups of customers: people popping into the cafe before catching their ferry.
Taigh Chearsabhagh is one of Uist’s creative hubs. Providing workshop and exhibition spaces, its cafe and post office also make it a vital community space.
It’s hard to predict the effect the closures will have on the art centre’s business – but the team is planning to find out.
They will record their monthly turnover during the closure, Mr Hart says. They will then compare the results to this time last year, which was “more or less a normal year”.
By sending his findings to MSP Alasdair Allan and MP Alistair Campbell, Mr Hart hopes to again raise the issue of compensation with the Scottish Government.
Last month, a Transport Scotland representative said there were “no plans” to compensate Hebridean businesses after ferry disruption.
But Mr Hart pointed out that there is already a precedent for compensation schemes on the mainland.
‘If they can get it, why can’t we?’
In 2019, Edinburgh business owners had access to a ‘Community Fund’ when the construction of a new tram extension impacted sales.
“If they can get it, why can’t we?”
With the disruption scheduled for the winter months, the hope is that tourism won’t be dramatically impacted.
If all goes well, Mr Clark says that there shouldn’t be a “fundamental effect” on Taigh Chearsabhagh’s profits.
But there is always the risk of the project taking longer than expected. And as islanders still wait for the years-late new vessels at the heart of the ferries scandal, that’s something they’re all too aware of.
Mr Clark says that any delays would push the cancellations dangerously close to the Easter holidays, when there would be “a much more significant impact.”
“If the March 16th date starts to drift by even a couple of weeks, we would have very big concerns about that.”
More local reporting from the Western Isles: