The Journey to Mostyn

We were delighted with the ship and as The Duke of Lancaster is a steam turbine vessel which was very much in full working order when we purchased her and we also knew that as she had only just come out of service so we knew she was sea-worthy.

But to bring the ship around under her own steam would mean the boilers would have to be fully stoked. Fueling the ship wasn’t an issue because her deep tanks still contained a great deal of fuel oil.

Where we did have a problem was if we chose to bring the ship around under her own steam we needed a more specialist crew but more importantly it would have meant applying for a completely different set of certificates which may have been more difficult to secure.

More crucially than both of those issues, if the ship had come in under her own steam, her stern would have dropped as the propellers push her through the water, as such there was a very significant risk that she would ground on her way in.

As such it was considered easier to just pull her by tug from Barrow, so the deep tanks on the ship were ballasted and trimmed to give her the minimum and most even draft possible to get her over the sand banks.

The ship would rely on her onboard generators for power, of which there were three in the engine room but a standby generator was never the less placed on an upper deck. In transit it would be necessary for all the navigation lights, radars, radios, winches and interior power to be available.

The Ships engineer on the journey was provided by Sealink and he had previously served on the ship and had an excellent working knowledge of her.

The rest of the motley crew under the command of Captain Metcalfe for that journey was made up mostly of market traders and their families.

One young lad, a student from Wolverhampton who worked the markets for pocket money hadn’t even seen the sea before in his life when he arrived at Barrow. So even so early on in his life, this was something of an adventure of a life time for him.

At the end of the first week of August 1979, with the assistance of two tugs from Bangor, Captain Metcalfe eased The Duke of Lancaster out of what should have been her final resting place.

By the early evening the ship had made steady progress and had crossed Morecombe Bay before finally reaching Liverpool Bay.

Up until then, it had been a completely uneventful journey and perhaps the tide of bad luck and problems had finally turned for the project but Mother Nature intervened and what Captain Metcalfe described as the mother of all storms blew up out of nowhere.

The tugs were soon in difficultly holding such a dead weight in place in very fierce seas and high winds. The weather was so bad that the ropes holding The Duke to the tugs were continually breaking under the strain.

The deck hands had to work through some very challenging times and as some were only just acquainting themselves with the sea, many were fighting sea-sickness as well as the elements.

1979 was a totally different world in terms of free and easy communications, the mobile phone revolution wasn’t to start in earnest for another 10 years, so contact with the ship was arduous and very intermittent.

The Harbormaster at The Port Of Mostyn was Captain Nightingale. He tried to remain in constant contact with the ship via ship to shore radio but because of the fierce weather conditions, he often had use both Liverpool and Hoylake Coastguard stations to act relay stations to the ship.

The plight of The Duke started to attract the attention of the local news crews and seeing aerial shots of the ship in difficultly added to the stress the whole operation was already placing on myself and my partners.

All in all The Duke spent almost two days and two nights being held in place in the Estuary whilst the storms kicked up.

After an arduous second night, we woke to see The Duke, still attached to the tugs and still very much afloat.