Helmsdale

Contacts
New Harbour Master Donald Sutherland (part time) 01431 821692 mob 07767 311213 VHF 13 (when manned)

Helmsdale is on the Caithness shore of the Moray Firth about halfway between Inverness and Wick, being about five or six hours from either (maybe a bit longer to Inverness when you add in Inverness Firth). Because of this, it is an ideal place to stop if you are day hopping along the coast; it's also about six hours to Lossiemouth. It used to be better when they had a full time HM and the dredging of the entrance was more regular; now it is a bit iffy for a keel boat. They haven't seen a dredger here for at least ten years and it is now definitely a half tide harbour. Keel boats will be unable to tie up on the pontoon because, although they do sink into the mud, they do not sink to their hulls but remain balanced half in and half out. They have had a silting up of the entrance to the inner harbour here; It's OK in the inbound channel but as soon as you turn to starboard for the Inner harbour there's a sand bar. They are quoting 2 hours either side of HW for entry in with a "normal" yacht. It's a Catch 22 situation; there aren't enough visitors to generate the funds for dredging and it gets more silty, which further reduces the visitors, and so on.

So, we have a narrow channel with up to 1m above CD depth, leading into a narrowish harbour with a pontoon which has two to three moorings for visiting boats. In strong SE winds it is, as you can imagine, not a good idea to attempt entry.

There has been a settlement here since early Christianity, through the Viking raids, continuing through the Clearances of the early 1800s to the herring boom of the second half of the nineteenth century and on to today. The first bridge was built in the early nineteenth century, the area was developed and a village laid out to attract fishermen to settle here; mind you, due to the Clearances carried out by the landowner, Lord Sutherland, it was a case of settle here, elsewhere on the coast, or emigrate to the Colonies.

The people in this part of the world still smart about the Clearances which were carried out by the landowners (mainly English) who cleared all the inhabitants inland out of their small dwellings and off their little crofts to make way for the more profitable enterprise of raising of sheep in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. This was only fifty or sixty years after the ethnic cleansing following the 1745 Jacobite rising; not a good time for the clans.

Anyway, I digress; before the herring & white fish boom there had been salmon and trout fishing in the estuary and long line fishing in the bay so when the boom did start there was a skill base to develop it. The harbour was built and opened in 1818 and that is the harbour we see today. The road bridge was built much later in the 1970s during the building of which the ruins of Helmsdale Castle were completely bulldozed; how they got away with that I don't know but it had been a ruin for over a century so it was probably thought about time for it to go!.

There are the remains of the old harbour just beyond the bridge but don't even think about going there; it is completely silted up and disused (apart from a couple of old clinker built dories) and the piles forming its outer walls are jagged sharks teeth waiting to puncture your hull.

Much information about the village is on their very good website and we have given a link for that; suffice it to say that it is a vibrant community, the people are hospitable and you will find ample opportunity to just sit and while away the time beside the harbour, chatting to older inhabitants about "better times"

There is a Dylan Winter Keep turning Left video of this coast; Helmsdale is at minute 22.50

There is also drone footage at (8) Helmsdale Harbour Sutherland drone aerial video clip helmsdale00000322 - YouTube