Finding A Ship

We instructed a London Based shipbroker called Seascope to help find a suitable ship and soon came up with a number of possibilities.

The Clan Lines had a triple deck cargo ship called The Clan McInnes which was schedule for retirement. Whilst the ship required a considerable about of re-engineering to suit the required purpose it was never the less considered.

The knowledge of project was gathering pace, particularly within the shipping industry.

Many industry ‘experts’ considered it impossible to get a ship worthy of the project into the small dock at Llanerch-y-Mor.

Perhaps for the benefit of people who are unfamiliar with the area, it’s worthwhile to explain that Llanerch-y-Mor lies on the North Wales side of the River Dee. The River Dee it totally tidal, that means the river completely empties twice a day leaving only sand banks.

The Port Of Mostyn has an ever present battle with the shifting sands and has throughout its history had to dredge the channels of the river just to keep operational.

The people with the vision remained optimistic, particularly me and in many ways found the dissent within the industry as an incentive to prove the experts wrong.

The draft of the ship however was a big, big issue. As previously stated the tidal nature of the River Dee means the channels and sandbanks are constantly shifting and changing.

To discover the draft available at the port a very simple but extremely clever method was adopted.

A pole was placed in the dock at low tide. When the tide slowly came in, a mark was made on the pole at the exact point when the surrounding sandbanks became covered with water. The tide then came in fully and a second mark was made at high water.

Once the tide had receded again, the distance between the two marks was taken, giving the approximate minimum draft the ship would need to be in order to get it into the dock.

The height of the tide was referenced to what was expected in the tide timetable for Mostyn and it was estimated that on the highest tide of the year, we had 15 foot of draft to play with.

Once this was known to Seascape continued their search and quickly reported back that the The Duke Of Lancaster was available out of Barrow-in-Furness on a “as is where lies” basis.

At that time we had no idea of the heritage of the ship. All we knew was she was a formerly a British Rail Cruise ship that had been converted to a car ferry a number of years ago by converting of the passenger accommodation decks into a car deck.

She really was only a car ferry, as she could only handle two heavy goods vehicles on any crossing as the height on the car desk was limited.

This limitation meant that the ship was slowly losing its usefulness and the introduction of ships with much larger heavy goods capacities in the mid to late seventies meant that British Rail didn’t really have a need for her anymore and she was pensioned off.

Although we had no previous knowledge The Duke we viewed it immediately and I was delighted with what we’d found.

Not only was she still in very, very good condition she was already kitted out with bars, restaurants, fully fitted cabins, lounge areas, a small cinema and a car deck ideal for use as the “Petticoat Lane” style market we had hoped for.

This was beyond our wildest expectations at the time.