Wick

Contacts
HM (Ian Cormack) 01955 602030 VHF 14

Wick Harbour is managed by the Wick Harbour Trust and is outwith the Highland Council's sphere of influence. They first put pontoons in the outer harbour in 2007 but removed them and replaced them with pontoons in the inner harbour in 2009. This is much more sheltered and is safe from all wind directions, once you are in.

The entry to the harbour is difficult in anything over force four from the Eastern quadrant and downright dangerous over force six. This is because one has to turn across the sea to gain entry to the NNE facing harbour entrance (you can see how bad it gets in our photo gallery for this harbour) and records for the 1800s (pre steam) tell of many wrecks.

There have been many periods of development going right back to pre history, all in connection with the sea. The name "Wick" is derived from the Norse and it was the Vikings who held this area of Scotland in earlier times; the first settlement was on the North side of the river and it was not until the early 1800s that Thomas Telford was commissioned with laying out a "modern" fishing town which he did on the South side, calling it Pulteneytown after Sir William Pulteney who commissioned it.

It was laid out on a grand scale, the dwellings at the top being for those making the biggest profits from the fishing and the area at the bottom of the hill for the people who did the work. The ruined breakwater to the SE of the present harbour was built in the 1860s in an attempt to protect the harbour from Easterly storms which it did for about nine years after it was built and then was, itself, wrecked by the said storms!!

There is a large area of sheds and warehouses backing the harbour and in the herring boom this was a hive of activity associated with the gutting, curing and storing of herring; there were coopers, net makers, sail makers, boat builders etc. It has to be remembered that, although Wick was developed as a fishing town in the early 1800s the railway didn't arrive here until 1874; before the arrival of that railway, Wick was virtually cut off from the rest of the world other than through the port so all the fish landed here had to be processed and then put back on ships for export so that there was as much going out as coming in (more if you count the export of agricultural products from the hinterland); busy place indeed.

Nowadays there is much less activity, the herring have gone, the whitefish quotas have hit and hence the marina has been built to maximise the income for the Harbour Trust. The marina has an excellent lay out, plenty of room to manoeuvre, and wide berths. They would have had room to put in more berths and made it as tricky to get into as those on the English Channel, but given the amount of leisure traffic up here they've got it about right and anyway they can always increase the number of berths at a later date if they have the trade.

That last paragraph was written quite a few years ago and has proved to be true because, now, in 2022, they have a massive wind farm under construction and an oilfield being decommissioned off the coast so have have put in three heavy duty pontoons in the NW corner of the Inner harbour and have dredged the River Harbour to take commercial cargo vessels. The navigation lighting has been changed to match this re-opening of the River Harbour so, if you intend a night arrival, you'd best have a look at the new set up.

The main use by the cruising yacht fraternity is as a convenient spot to gird ones loins for the Pentland Firth or to lick ones wounds after crossing it. A quick word here about the Pentland; do it at the wrong time of tide and in the wrong weather and you'll take a battering and risk foundering; do it at the right time and it's a pussy cat; maybe a lively pussy cat, but a pussy cat nonetheless. You will hear many nth-hand tales of gloom and disaster and may have even witnessed some but it's really not any worse than any other tidal choke point around our coastline. A trip from Stromness to Wick can take six or seven hours (depending on the size of boat) on the right tide but on the same day, if you miss the tide, it can take ten hours and also be wretched. The timings for this passage are given as an additional notes in the "More Info" section below:

It is of interest that as far back as 1840 there was growing alarm in Wick at the amount of whisky being consumed and, as a result, in 1922 Wick went "dry" and remained so until 1947. The Pulteney Distillery was forced to close its doors through lack of trade in 1930 and did not reopen until 1951. So, the United States didn't invent Prohibition, the Scotts (who invented just about everything else) did and they hung on to it long after the States gave it up; mind you the Scots didn't have an Alastair McCapone to deal with (but you can bet there were many "speakeasies" but called something cleverer in the Gaelic!)

There is plenty of interest in the town to keep the visitor busy, especially if interested in history and it's a good spot to re-provision for your onward trip; very few yachtsmen cruising in theses seas pass it by. It's about a hundred miles from Peterhead, fifty or so from Banff/Whitehills and the same from Lossie and Inverness. Onward and Northward, it's convenient for Scrabster (if West Bound), Stromness and west about the Orkneys to Kirkwall, or via Holm Sound or Deer Sound to Kirkwall and the Northern Orkneys.