This harbour has been part of me from childhood, says retiring Scrabster manager
Sandy Mackie was 43 when he was appointed as Scrabster Harbour Trust manager. Now 60, he is retiring from the job with turnover at a record level as the port reaps the benefits of more than £38 million of investment in improved infrastructure and facilities since 2011.
However, Sandy’s connection with Scrabster goes all the way back to when he was a boy, checking out the fishing boats and watching vehicles being lifted on and off the St Ola in the days before roll-on/roll-off ferries came on the scene.
“This is a harbour that has been part of me from childhood,” he recalled. “My dad was a general worker at Dounreay. He worked shifts, so he would only have one weekend off in three. And on a Saturday we would come into Thurso, drop off my mum and my sisters, and then me and my dad would go for an ice cream and then we’d come down to Scrabster.
“We’d go round looking at the seine-netters, and the old Ola would be coming along, and the fascination of seeing cars being unloaded and loaded with nets… It has been part of my life for quite a long time. It has been great to be involved in the harbour and marine life.”
Sandy was brought up in Reay (“God’s own country as far as I’m concerned”). He went to university in Aberdeen to study Economic and Social History, then switched to accountancy. After a postgraduate course, he trained as a chartered accountant in the Granite City.
“I’m very pro-Caithness,” Sandy said. “My wife [Norma] is from Thurso – she’s an Atomic, her family moved up from Arbroath. We thought it would be retirement before we got to move back, but an opportunity came up in 1993 at Dounreay. It didn’t really work for me and I then went to Thurso College, as it was then [in 1994], to be the accountant. I then became finance director there.
“I was grateful I got the choice to be able to come back. It’s fine for young people to go away and see what the rest of the world offers, but to have the opportunity to come back is quite important.
“I’m fortunate because both my daughter and my son [Ailidh and Struan] followed that same route. They’ve gone away and they’ve come back, so I hope for future generations that’s still possible.”
Sandy says he has been fortunate to have spent most of his career with organisations that make their decisions locally.
“The college prospered in part due to the availability of European money but it was able to do great things,” he said. “It was able to offer further education right across the Highlands.
“I put that down to localism. Whilst I was at the college I became a member of the board of Scrabster, in 2005, and then became an employee, the trust manager, in 2007.
“Again I think Scrabster Harbour Trust is a wonderful example of local people making the right decisions to improve the lot of their organisation and also the wider community.
“So I’m very fortunate I’ve had the privilege to serve those two organisations. I think they’ve left a good legacy.”
Sandy left his harbour trust role for a brief spell with the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) in 2009 before returning the following year. He insists the Scrabster success story has been very much a team effort.
“It’s a collective thing,” he said. “When I arrived in 2007 we had a problem with the Old Fishmarket Pier and we were envisaging doing a project that was £4 million.
“That quickly turned into a wider and more ambitious vision for the port and I have to give great credit to William Calder Snr, the former chairman, for putting that forward. He felt that only by improving Scrabster were you putting yourself more in the shop window for better things and more activities to happen.
“We’ve carried that forward. To do a programme of work that’s £38 million is impressive – I think it’s impressive for a small team of individuals, supported by advisers, to have achieved that.
“We put forward a vision. We then did the hard task, which is getting all the permissions, getting the procurements, which is a bit of an obstacle course, and most importantly assembling multi-funder financing for it, which is very difficult, and then delivering the project successfully.
“The biggest two elements of that £38 million were the Old Fishmarket Pier, which became what we now call the Jubilee Quay [completed in 2013], and then we did the St Ola Pier [opened in 2021]. We managed to bring them both in under budget.
“Marine projects are risky, so that’s a great achievement, and beyond that we’re now realising the project benefits. We’re going to have our AGM at the end of the month and that will show that our turnover is now at a record level, above £5 million, and we’re in good cash flow and profitability.
“Now that’s good for the trust, but that’s a reflection of the wider activity that’s going on and that’s what truly benefits the local economy and the community.
“We asked the question [in 2009]: how many jobs are dependent on Scrabster? And nobody knew the answer. With a bit of money from the NDA we got an independent economist to come in and he came up with a figure of, I think, 330 full-time equivalents.
“After we completed the Jubilee Quay project we did the same exercise again, around about 2016, and even in that short space of time that number had gone from 330 up to over 400. I suspect if we repeated that exercise again there would be even more jobs.
“We’re an enabler. We create opportunities. One thing that surprises me is that people don’t come and ask us, ‘How did you do it?’ There are bigger organisations that have taken much longer to do projects with bigger resources.
“You have to be determined, but again I think it reflects localism. A lot of the hard work was at the front end of it because if you can de-risk certain elements of the project that makes your life easier. It has been a great learning experience.”
Scrabster is an energy port as well as a fishing harbour. It is a ferry terminal and also a cruise-ship destination, with 10,000 cruise passengers having arrived this year. However, no single sector is prioritised over any other.
“Clearly being a lifeline ferry port is very important, and it’s the major revenue contributor,” Sandy said. “But with the development programme, we weren’t doing it just for one sector.
“We’d do it to create multipurpose, multifunctional infrastructure, and that’s about creating a diversified activity base – if one thing is down in one year, you hope that something else is going to offset it. That gives us stability going forward.
“We’ve got great opportunities in terms of offshore wind, as do many ports, and the challenge is being able to accommodate that in a way that is complementary.
“We want everything, and I think the county would like everything as well. We don’t want to do something that interferes with an existing trade. Having as many activities as possible gives you some sort of insurance policy for the future.
“On a day-to-day basis that makes it a very interesting job because no two days are the same. The emphasis is constantly changing.
“Cruise is in a much better position because of the St Ola project and that’s bearing fruit. Having 10,000 passengers is excellent, and the fact that we’re able to have the largest vessels that we’ve ever had at Scrabster over the summer period.
“Are we going to turn ourselves into a Kirkwall or an Invergordon? No. And I think there’s a good reason for that. It fits nicely with the other trades. It also fits nicely with what the county can accommodate. What we’re trying to do is come up with something that’s a sustainable model.
“We’ve been here since 1841 [when Scrabster Harbour Trust was established by an Act of Parliament] and we intend to be here for considerably longer.
“It’s a great form of ownership and that has also appealed to me. There are no owners of the harbour – the harbour trust is the custodian of the asset that is the harbour, and our duty is to maintain that asset and, if possible, hand it over to future generations in a better condition. There’s a phrase from 1841 that having a harbour at Scrabster would be of great utility to the local area. That continues today.
“It’s a changing landscape. Will there be further development in the future? Definitely. Scrabster will continue to evolve, but the important thing is that it evolves for the right reasons and that it creates benefit for the area. That is what we’re here to do.
“I’d like to express my gratitude to the current chairman, Tom Pottinger, and to successive boards for the opportunity and for their support. They’ve been great, absolutely first class.”
Sandy’s replacement is Ryan Maclean, previously a senior operations manager with Tesco Business Solutions. “It’s good that Ryan is getting the opportunity to come back to the county and he’s excited by that,” Sandy said.
“He’s coming to the port sector entirely fresh, but I’m living proof that that can work. I wish him well.”
In retirement, Sandy intends to spend more time playing golf. “I was brought up 400 yards from the golf course,” he explained. “I’ve been a member of Reay Golf Club, past captain, since 1972. Even when I was a student and when we lived away, I kept my membership.
“I lost my handicap about 10 years ago, so one of the aims in retirement is to get back playing golf. Whether I’ll get a card in my hand again I don’t know, but Reay Golf Club is one of my favourite places on earth.
“I’ve spent the better part of 40 years in offices, so now I want to get outdoors again.”