cherish your harbour master - a rant!

dom said:
..My instinct however is that Newport is a wasted resource;...
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Undoubtedly. It always ticks along with a fairly consistent number of visiting boats - and repeat visitors, you see individual boats and rallies reappear year after year, so they must be doing something right. There is always a similar number of boats wintered on the quay and pontoons year in, year out too.

I know of local people who want to develop the harbour sympathetically and help it prosper but their plans are hampered by a few self interested locals who want to just use the limited facilities for free - for instance they have launched legal challenges to leases being granted for longer than 2 years on harbour land and no one will invest if they stand a chance of being turfed out after 2 years.

The council spent many years acquiring all the land round the harbour with a view of developing it. Back in more affluent times when the plans for a cill were being kicked about there were many other grand plans floated - one of the more extreme was high speed wireless broadband covering the whole of the island so that all council workers could work from home, then the council building was to be knocked down and the IWs own Gunwharf would have stretched right the way through from the quay up to where the cinema now is. On a smaller scale buildings for leisure use have been planned along the harbour side, the hotel was the first one, but planning and lease objections have discouraged any investment there too.
 
JumbleDuck said:
That pretty accurately describes people who want ever-posher facilities for visiting yachtsmen even if it means pricing out, or otherwise displacing, traditional local users. Not all of us want every harbour or creek turned into an expensive marina.
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And some of us visitors would quite like to visit somewhere "unspoiled" rather than yet another marina, as well. And not just because it's cheaper, but because it's more interesting.

Pete
 
birdseye said:
The old system was quite reasonable and the people were helpful. That isnt the issue really. Its the dressing up of a basic service in fancy clothes, getting management structures and job descriptions and marketing plans, and logo etc and then charging much more for the same old mooring you had before all the bull****. The management are already comparing their prices with the south coast ie the solent.
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Spot on. Dressing it all up under a new business banner, with a new website, access to weather and tide 'tools' (info that anyone can already access from a wide range of other free sources), 'premium' moorings that cost an eye watering sum therefore are only of interest to the very well-heeled, forcing private mooring owners of long-standing to surrender them and take a serviced mooring at significantly higher costs (so that they can turn old private moorings into yet more serviced moorings and rent them out for still more money) or give up their boats. It's all ballcocks!!! Prices rose approx 30% across the board last year IIRC... what's coming this year I wonder? Improving facilities... Who for???? Anyone with a serviced mooring can't even use the loos to take a piss (let alone use the showers) in the Grove Park yard... "They're only for use by visitors", despite the fact that locals are helping to bloody pay for them!!

No one has said outright that it's to raise funds to cover the Pilot's Pension black hole ... Why is there such a black hole by the way? Incompetence? Negligence?

Seem's to me that it's a concerted effort to wring as much money from the harbour as is humanly possible. Try and get the costs up to Solent rates without local Solent wages to support it. So the end result will be local boat owners forced off the water so that higher-paying others from up country can keep their boats in Falmouth instead.

It's a bloody scandal the way that The Haven management seem to have just railroaded everyone.
 
prv said:
Bearing in mind I don't really know the place, and this is a genuine question, what exactly is the problem with leaving it as-is? The river will presumably still be there, and if local folks are happy to keep their boats on it on a self-help basis rather than through an organised harbour authority, what's wrong with that?

I guess I'm asking what does "the harbour dying" actually mean?

Pete
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The harbour walls are crumbling, the river is silting, there would be quite far reaching consequences further afield as a lot of flood drainage comes through sluices and into the river at Newport. Nice idea of a few local folks using it on a self help basis but already there is an element of "squatting" and people trying to restrict use of areas and access by other people - some of the boat owners are more of a problem than local yobs. Significant parts of the harbour would become no go areas for the majority of people. We're not talking of a nice little quay up a creek somewhere like Shalfleet. You should see some of the rotting hulks that people keep there now - boats that nowhere else would tolerate - they would only proliferate if it was no longer regulated and they wouldn't be locals.
 
l'escargot said:
I know of local people who want to develop the harbour sympathetically and help it prosper but their plans are hampered by a few self interested locals who want to just use the limited facilities for free - for instance they have launched legal challenges to leases being granted for longer than 2 years on harbour land and no one will invest if they stand a chance of being turfed out after 2 years.
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Fully agree with your sentiments. There will always be local interests and they should of course be listened to; as should those who crave a picturesquely decaying harbour. But one can overdo the preservation thing; am I the only one to feel a twinge of sadness in the North of England museums, where plastic replica miners with soot painted faces toil from 9-5 (extended opening in the summer) under some patronising soundtrack of a Northern working class vernacular?

Communities need jobs and jobs seem to be a problem on the IoW, so something needs to be done (well this is a rant thread!). According to the BBC in 2012:


"The problem of youth unemployment on the Isle of Wight is "absolutely horrendous", according to a youth charity manager.

"Heath Monaghan, of the Foyer in Ryde, said the lack of jobs on the island was "huge" and "right across the board".

"His comments come as new research for the BBC by Experian found that the number of businesses on the island had fallen by an average of 2% a year between July 2010 and February 2012.

"The research found that, although the number of business start-ups increased in almost every part of England, the Isle of Wight, Southampton and Portsmouth all saw their overall number of businesses fall."
 
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So, the place can't get funding for development, which the owners of the sort of boats that can get there probably don't want anyway.

It's not attractive enough to entice more boat owners, so the harbour goes the same way as countless other places; given 100 years or so it might be a lot more interesting !
 
BlueSkyNick said:
How much income tax money goes towards managing public harbours? Not a lot I suggest, nothing probably.
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Hopefully, nothing. Harbours should be self supporting IMO. But that isnt the issue. The issue is raising the costs of running a harbour by adding unnecessary baubles on the management tree thus justifying higher salaries etc. In short, empire building.

If you go into a french harbour in summer you will see that most of the manning is local kids hired on the cheap for the season. Thats what Falmouth should do. One man as HM, one woman to do the office work and then temps as needed.

Its a problem shared by your lcal authority and the NHS. Lots of people mostly working hard but doing things that dont need doing.
 
KevO said:
No one has said outright that it's to raise funds to cover the Pilot's Pension black hole ... Why is there such a black hole by the way? Incompetence? Negligence?
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Teignmouth Harbour Authority state in their annual reports that there is a Pilots Pension black hole deficit, and that they have taken advice as to what they can do about it and is it their problem, seems that the answer they have is that it is their inherited problem.

Since the Authority took on the moorings responsibility and charging etc there has been a quite noticeable decline in locals using the harbour, indeed, if I venture an opinion /observation, the picturesque beach scenes might well not be an attraction in the future :(
 
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Seajet said:
So, the place can't get funding for development, which the owners of the sort of boats that can get there probably don't want anyway.

It's not attractive enough to entice more boat owners, so the harbour goes the same way as countless other places; given 100 years or so it might be a lot more interesting !
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It will probably be as interesting and as useful to boat owners as Brading Harbour now is...
 
Capt Popeye said:
Teignmouth Harbour Authority state in their annual reports that there is a Pilots Pension black hole deficit, and that they have taken advice as to what they can do about it and is it their problem, seems that the answer they have is that it is their inherited problem.

Since the Authority took on the moorings responsibility and charging etc there has been a quite noticeable decline in locals using the harbour, indeed, if I venture an opinion /observation, the picturesque beach scenes might well not be an attraction in the future :(
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see #3
 
dom said:
...Communities need jobs and jobs seem to be a problem on the IoW, so something needs to be done (well this is a rant thread!). According to the BBC in 2012:


"The problem of youth unemployment on the Isle of Wight is "absolutely horrendous", according to a youth charity manager.

"Heath Monaghan, of the Foyer in Ryde, said the lack of jobs on the island was "huge" and "right across the board".

"His comments come as new research for the BBC by Experian found that the number of businesses on the island had fallen by an average of 2% a year between July 2010 and February 2012.

"The research found that, although the number of business start-ups increased in almost every part of England, the Isle of Wight, Southampton and Portsmouth all saw their overall number of businesses fall."
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Don't hold your breath, talks are already going on about the next round of council job losses - with 28 million of savings to make the council can't hang on to what they've got let alone take on more...
 
Comrade Red said:
The charge I really hate at Falmouth, bearing in mind I have a harbour mooring, is the £5 to tie my tender up (limited for 2 hours from memory) at the yacht haven if I want to go into town.

Just blatant money grabbing.
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It is the turn of the screw.

Plymouth put their moorings up by roughly a third two years ago. So it is 400 quid for your mooring plus the costs of renewal, hauling and certification which are down to the boatowner and have to be organised by him. I am guessing there is little hope of things getting better.

The problem with not charging for dinghies is that the dock is soon littered with semi derelict hulks tied up with 2 foot of polyprop which is a great nuisance in places like Fowey and the Yealm.

Is there a better way to get ashore? I have used the pier in the past but you are likely to get a *** end, bag of chips or worse lobbed into the dinghy.


Bloody hell, it won't let me say fagg end
 
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l'escargot said:
Don't hold your breath, talks are already going on about the next round of council job losses - with 28 million of savings to make the council can't hang on to what they've got let alone take on more...
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Aha, you're now right at the heart of a major defect in the UK's deficit reduction programme; its failure to distinguish between straightforward waste and capital projects which would be expected to pay for themselves over time, not a difficult hurdle in today's ultra-low interest rate environment. The net effect is that those parts of the UK which have been left behind the more general economic recovery find themselves caught in a viscous circle of cuts and decay.

Within the European context Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Switzerland all have more enlightened social investment blueprints, which incidentally produce a decent return on investment over a period of years. I don't know why UK policymakers have so little interest.
 
KevO said:
It's a bloody scandal the way that The Haven management seem to have just railroaded everyone.
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i don't know how the management works so just done a quick Google. If I read the article below correctly, its down to lack of accountability of the commissioners i.e. they don't have to answer or justify their actions to anyone.

http://www.westbriton.co.uk/Reform-...ssioners-say/story-20899387-detail/story.html

“Falmouth Harbour Commissioners operate openly and transparently to a high standard of governance.

“It reports in detail through its annual reports and holds a public meeting on an annual basis.”
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So they report what's been done in the past, but don't get any agreement to what they plan to do in the future.
 
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BlueSkyNick said:
i don't know how the management works so just done a quick Google. If I read the article below correctly, its down to lack of accountability of the commissioners i.e. they don't have to answer or justify their actions to anyone.

http://www.westbriton.co.uk/Reform-...ssioners-say/story-20899387-detail/story.html



So they report what's been done in the past, but don't get any agreement to what they plan to do in the future.
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I thinks that about sums it up. They do what they want then tell everyone about it after the fact.
 
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