Graham Hall on Transport

I was on the Cowes Express Hovercraft after I left Trinity House, for a while and coming down at 40 knots into Cowes Harbour in the middle of a Cowes Week race is quite exciting.

We only did it for one year, but I didn’t want to repeat that experience too often. It was an attempt by Cowes Express to break with, I think the monopoly of the existing ferry fares, ferry owners but unfortunately it wasn’t successful.

One of the problems was that because we were deemed to be a Hovercraft we had to have, for safety reasons, five crew, whereas a Hydrofoil which Red Funnel run only needed three crew and that sort of makes a big difference to your wage bill.

I remember, because of the wake the Hovercraft made, they said, “Well you shouldn’t run them, together because it makes too much disturbance of the water” so what they said was “We’ll break them up by five minutes” you know, “The Red Funnel can come in and you can’t come in until five minutes later” which meant you missed all the London trains, which didn’t help and things like but it was fun while we did it.

I brought one of them down, I was on the crew that brought one of them down from North Norway to Cowes and that’s quite a trip. Came down the North Sea at 40 knots, following down.

Left Haugesund in Norway about two o’clock in the afternoon their time, about one o’clock our time and we had breakfast in Cowes. That was quite exciting, that was a lot of fun going through the Fjords of Norway on one of those things at 40 knots is really exciting.