Stornoway ferry

Stornoway ferry, MV Loch Seaforth, has returned to her normal timetable after days of travel chaos.

The vessel suffered a major breakdown at sea, drifting without power in the middle of the Minch with 340 people onboard.

With three packed-out return sailings scheduled daily, vessel worked hard to convey delayed passengers to their destinations.

Two lifeboats and a salvage tug headed to the scene after a suspected cooling system fault caused her main engines to completely shut down on Wednesday.

Compounding the problems was a power cut onboard the ship which was on route from Ullapool to Stornoway.

A tow from the coastguard emergency tug MV Ievoli Black was not required as ferry engineers regained limited propulsion using a “spare engine” set-up where one of her generators drove a propulsion unit to turn a propeller, allowing her to steam to Stornoway at a reduced speed of 12 knots.

Cal Mac was drawing up contingency plans to reshuffle its overstretched fleet to allow the MV Isle of Lewis to cover the Stornoway route - a move which would have brought disruption to other islands.

However, following repairs, the Loch Seaforth returned to service relatively quickly though sailings ran up to six hours behind schedule.

Revised timetables were out of sync with the Ullapool bus services though extra coaches were brought in on Saturday.

Only a break in her relentless timetable allowed the Seaforth to finally catch-up today (Sun).

She carried out sea trials at midnight to test the main engines at top speed.

The comhairle says the episode emphasises why two ferries are required on the increasingly busy route.

Stornoway ferry back to normal timetable after days of disruption

12 August 2018