Blog at the Ballast

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Information about the PS Waverley 1946 can be found here, here and here.

So, step 1. I go into our stationary cupboard which has several small filing cabinets full of Dan McDonald's photographs, slides and negatives. They are organised according to type of vessel and subject or area if they are non boat shots. If there is something in particular on then I will try and choose a picture related to that.

Step 2 - scan the picture. When I have an image I like I go and scan it and save it onto our shared drive. I might crop the picture a bit to tidy it up but I generally leave them alone.

Step 3 - blog it! I then write a post about the image. This is obviously the hardest part as often there is very little information about the picture on the back of it. I usually ask the volunteers or Duncan if they happen to know anything about the image I've chosen. This usually results in me getting lots of information which makes it a lot easier. However, if I'm by myself in the office I have to resort to google....

For example, last weeks photo was of a passenger ferry on the Clyde. I was by myself when I put the post together so I googled Clyde river ferry and got 248,000 results. My usual next step is to see if any of the results contain information from the Scran or Canmore websites. This is because they have digital images that allow me to check and see if my image is the same as theirs. This image in particular confirmed that my image was of the ferry terminal at the Govan Graving works and not the Kelvinhaugh one instead.

Once I have a bit of information about the image and its uploaded then it all goes live and is open for comments or questions. I'm fairly sure that some of my guesses about the images are going to be wrong and would be happy to have them corrected.

There were two Pibroch puffers but this is the first one and was according to this site built "for the Mackie Bros, of the White Horse Distillery of Lagavulin, Islay. She served them and their successors, Scottish Malt Distillers for 34 years and was a familiar sight on her weekly voyages to Islay. She was replaced by the motor vessel in 1957, was sold and renamed Texa. She later became Cumbrae Lass which name she retained until she was broken up in 1967."