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Interview: Manager Murray MacLeod

I’m Murray MacLeod. I live up in Uig in Lewis. I run a business called Seatrek. Uh, Seatrek’s really involved in whale watching, passenger carrying, uh, tourist trips, commercial work. Uh, it probably started about nine – early nineteen eighties. That’s when I started doing it first on a part-time basis, and probably for the last eighteen, twenty years it’s been, yeah twenty years I would say, it’s been pretty much, uh, full on. It’s certainly seasonal, through the summer April to September, and then on demand after that.

Uh, we’ve got two types of boat we use. We use a rigid inflatable, a delta RIB, and they’re – one of them, we’ve got two of them. The main one’s a nine and a half meter delta RIB with an inboard diesel on it, and it’s got seating for twelve on it. And that is the boat that’s used for most of the local work, the short trips, exhilarating trips, the wildlife trips etcetera. We run that about the Uig area, but then we have taken it as far as Oban and, you know, right up to Orkney.

We also have a big hard boat. Uh, it’s called Lochlann, and that’s an Interceptor 42, and that’s the one we use mainly now for the day trips – St Kilda, Flannan Isles, or on demand where people want to go.

Each day is different. Uh, you’ll see, you may see, well you – hopefully we’ll see seals anyway, we’re guaranteed of them. Dolphins, we see them pretty often, porpoise, basking shark, uh, various whales, minke whales, pilot whales, killer whales, uh, humpbacks, you know, the list goes on. You see strange things like sunfish. In fact, one day this year I saw three sunfish together – never ever seen that. In fact, I’ve never seen more than one. And it was nice to see the three of them together. So, whether our waters are getting warmer and they’re coming here, or it’s just luck on the day to be in the right place, it’s always interesting.

But it’s fantastic for people to see these things because we’ll be just motoring along and all of a sudden, you know, a basking shark will appear pretty close to you – you just stop, switch the engine off, and just keep going, and it is, even for us, a buzz, and we see a lot of them, but for these passengers – they’ll never ever forget that.

Uh, there’s the tourism side, and still on the boats we do commercial hire. A lot of – we do, maybe, four or five filming projects each year. It varies from a BBC to small film companies, from a few hours hire to, you know, a few weeks sometimes. And that can vary from all sorts of things. Uh, we also do – probably the radio hams, as they call themselves, are probably one of the strangest ones we do. There’s people wanting to go out to a very remote island and broadcast to the world for about twenty four hours and then get off again. We get enquiries for them quite often, so, they’re different. And just people wanting to go and look at islands. You know, we had – we were up in Sula Sgeir earlier on this year with one person. And he wanted to go to Sula Sgeir and he was going to pay for the boat himself, and that’s fine. Different.

Um, for the other side of the boats, we do a lot of boat training, for the private sector, but mainly for the commercial sector. And that’s, uh, to getting people through their professional qualifications in power boats. And, uh, it’s quite intensive, there’s a lot of work involved, uh, so you just don’t, uh, turn up and sit the test and wander off again. It’s a lot of hard work – you’ve got, people have to put a lot of work into it themselves, a lot of studying, uh, navigation, uh, compass work, tides, and then obviously the bit – what we very often find is that the guys are very good at driving the boats, but it’s just the finer tuning with the navigation of what’s required, and work at night. It doesn’t come quite so easily to them.

Every day is different. You go out there. You don’t know what you’re going to see, the weather conditions are different. Some days can be pretty horrible. The next day it can be just absolutely stunning. Uh, and I think it is the variety in it. You know, different places, certainly, even through the winter I’m in different places every, maybe not every day but certainly every week I’m in a different place. I was up in Scrabster just three days ago, uh, delivering a boat down to Mallaig, and Torridon and these places. So you’re getting to see different places all the time, meeting different people. On my training course I’m meeting different people, spend the day with them, a few days. Obviously on the boat you’re meeting a lot of people because you can maybe have up to fifty people a day on the boat.

It’s never as easy as people, uh, think. You know people look from the outside and say oh yeah that, that looks quite easy, but a lot of people put a lot of work into making the whole thing work, and obviously the more we do, the more people that – good people I need, and I’ve – luckily I’ve got some very good people working with me, helping to get through it. And they work very well as a team, and they’re people I can call on at short notice, and it’s amazing how people will help out at very short notice. So that makes it easier. But it’s still not easy.

Clilstore Island VoicesSeatrek to St KildaIain Buchanan

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