Grace Ritchie

14.3C with sunny spells and cloudy spells. Light breeze

Maeve the Deerhound and I went through to Arbroath before 9am and had our walk round the harbour. The lock gate to the inner harbour was open, so we walked round to the boatyard. On the way round we saw the last of the day trip fishing boats leaving.

I took quite a few pictures today in good light and although this one is not my favourite (the sky is awful) I couldn't resist posting it. Grace Ritchie is a boat with many stories I'm sure, but one of its earliest has some significance for me and my research into my family history. I have put the details at the foot of today's journal entry.

Maeve went out to the back garden when we got home and she has been there since, lying in sun and shade. He croissant corner is still sitting untouched in her food dish ... again !

I went out for a walk after lunch. Northern Soul on the Nano. I went up to the church then down the bridle path to the shore road and back along the cycle path and round in a loop up the main road before turning along for home.

DMC-LX7 f/2.8 1/400 sec. ISO-80 11mm (35mm focal length 55mm)


As R.N.L.I. LIFEBOAT "GRACE PATERSON RITCHIE (70-002) the now Grace Ritchie was the Kirkwall lifeboat which brought the bodies of all but one of the eight men lost in the 1969 Longhope Lifeboat disaster back to Longhope pier from Scrabster, where the upturned lifeboat TGB had been towed by the Thurso lifeboat. On the 22nd of March 1969, after a service at Walls Old Church Longhope, the 7 Lifeboat men were laid to rest in Osmondwall church yard on the shores of Kirkhope looking out on the Pentland Firth. One crewman was never recovered. The disaster left seven widows and 10 orphans. Three of the crew were named Johnston. Father and two sons. One of the sons, Robert, was married to Ivy my second cousin (2x removed).

The findings of the inquiry held by the RNLI were that the "TGB" had been overwhelmed by very high seas and maelstrom conditions while proceeding eastwards between South Ronaldsay and Pentland Skerries. The 17 crew of the "Irene" were rescued from the shore, where she had driven in near GrimNess at the north-eastern end of South Ronaldsay, by the two coastguard emergency companies in the biggest breeches buoy operation ever effected in Orkney.

At the moment the Longhope boat went, some time just after 9.35. it seems probably that not even a 70ft boat, such as the "Grace Paterson Ritchie", would have survived in the conditions prevailing north of the Pentland Skerries, with an immense wind against an even more immense tide which would produce seas up to 60ft high with correspondingly deep pits between them

R.N.L.I. LIFEBOAT "GRACE PATERSON RITCHIE (70-002)
Named at Wemyss Bay on Wednesday, September 6, 1967 Off Wemyss Bay Pier
Built in 1965 as 'Yard Number 2272' by Yarrow Shipbuilders of Scotstoun in Glasgow.
She was one of a pair Yarrow- built, 70 foot long, "Clyde Class", R.N.L.I. lifeboats, these designed by John Tyrrell M.R.I.N.A. of Arklow.

The first of the R.N.L.I. lifeboats to have a steel hull, her £57,000 cost was met by a legacy from Miss Grace Paterson Ritchie of Skelmorlie, her desire being that the boat be deployed in Scottish waters and it too therefore fitting that the new vesselwas brought to Wemyss Bay for her naming ceremony, on September 6, 1967, the service conducted by The Rev. Dr. Donald C. Caskie of Skelmorlie and Wemyss Bay's North Church.

At the end of service it was sold to Iceland, renamed the "Henry A Halfdansson", and was the lifeboat in Reykjavik for a while. The boat was bought by Iain Crosbie in 2002 in Reykjavik, renamed "Grace Ritchie" and brought back to Scotland for restoration.