Buoys oh Buoys

 

A navigation buoy, probably Foyle or Tuns, being brought ashore at the bottom of Clarendon Street, Derry for maintenance & cleaning around the 1960s.
Photograph courtesy John McCarron

I can cheerfully admit that I know very little about buoys. David Bowie once told me that they keep swinging and always work it out but that's about the extent of my knowledge. Buoy maintenance is so far from my sphere of understanding that those employed in the field would probably regard me with scorn and / or pity.

However, I know enough to know that if you got a belt from the buoy in the wonderful picture above, you'd know about it. Actually, you probably wouldn't know about it. The point is, those things look pretty managable when they're in water but gigantic out of it.

The series of photographs below were sent to me by Chris Kates, a descendant of both the Fortune and the Jeffers dynasty of lightkeepers. The photographs show how buoys were rounded up, lassooed and broken in back in the 1940s and were taken at Ferris Point. They are all ‘Copyright estate of Eileen Kates, used by permission.’ 

Looks like Ballylumford in the background. On the look-out.

After a lot of swinging and working out, the buoy is finally caught

He's a doggone ornery crittur but the buoy is eventually broken in

The buoy agrees to come quietly so long as you pat his head and give him a sugarlump

This is the bit where you don't want him to keep swinging

Seriously, though, I bet if you ever went for a few pints with them lads, they'd be able to tell you a tale or two and I'd imagine there were a good few hospitalisations if not worse. Personally, they make me feel soft and inadequate.

This was the Granuaile at Dun Laoghaire a few years ago. I imagine you still have to keep your wits about you when the crane hauls up that orange buoy.

The Titanic Quarter up in Belfast has an area dedicated to buoys - well, three of them anyway, painted in the colours. Red ones are for the port side coming into port; black ones (or green) are for the starboard side coming into port; and the stripey ones are for a junction. Although they are hollow, they can weigh around three tons each and are anchored in place.

Outside the Mizen Centre in county Cork, the Foreland buoy is a long way from the Copeland Islands

Yellow Smart buoy outside Irish Lights HQ in Dun Laoghaire, going for the record for the largest QR code in the world