With our salmon tracking site approved by MSS, we decided to place the mooring and receiver in Ayr harbour today. Not in the useable harbour but upstream of any boat traffic beside the old railway bridge pillars.
Plan A was a good one (so we thought). Float the mooring on a raft and tow it to it’s position and then tip it in. We hadn’t banked on the wind that swamped the raft and sent the mooring to the bottom only 20 feet from the slip.
A hastily built and tested raft that we though should do the trick…
The raft with mooring, tracking receiver and chain attached…all ready to go
and shortly before ‘plan A’ was abandoned due to the raft shedding its load in the swell
It’s always good to have a ‘plan B’ and while it hadn’t really been fully considered or thought through, we hastily put it together and tried again. Plan B involved our inflatable dinghy that has a badly ripped floor and is virtually unusable for anything but something like this. The raft we had constructed was placed across the tubes and the mooring and transmitter rolled onto it before it was all launched. All looked rather more promising than our Plan A so we carefully progressed through the harbour and snaked our way through the shallows to the site.
Looking more promising
making progress upstream through the shipping areas
Snaking through the shallows at low tide. Our chosen spot was away from navigable waters and therefore presents no risk to any craft
About to drop the mooring into the lee of the bridge per and rock armour. It should be protected from any spate debris.
While this plan went well, it wasn’t flawless and tipping the thing off the tubes didn’t work so we hastily deflated a tube and hauled on the chain until the mooring was teetering on the edge. A final check of the depth and bottom and we let it sink below the surface. All seemed fine so we straightened out the chain and buoy and headed for dry land. A job well done.
