Graham Hall on Navigation

In those days we used to take a lot of coal out to The Needles because it was all coal-fired; the boiler, the fires, had fires and boilers, you know, these stoves, coal-fired stoves so they used a lot of coal and we used to carry all this out; we used to go anchor somewhere near The Needles.

There’s a special anchorage we went to, put the boat down and our boats used to deliver all these things. We couldn’t get alongside it with a ship of course, it was too dangerous and because we had to relieve Keepers there on a monthly basis we actually went, because they were staggered, we went on a fortnight there, there was a relief every fortnight.

We used to go there because it was a schedule, the weather didn’t come into it very much, so if it was a really rotten rough and horrible day we still had to go and we had quite a few exciting times at The Needles as a result of that, we didn’t choose our weather.

There was a local boat that used to go out there, Tubby Isaacs from Totland and he would go and fill in between as if somebody had to come off or go on, to save the expense of bringing a big ship down there to do it but he would only go out in fair weather.

We were the people that went out there when the weather wasn’t too special and there were several exciting moments there when seas broke over the landing when we were getting off and everybody had to scramble a bit quickly to get out of the way of it, you know, but it was a useful thing to do.

It gave me a lot of satisfaction to be able to do things like that. It was quite demanding, it was better than perhaps just routine watch keeping which one gets used to when you’re crossing oceans so that was it.