https://puffersandvics.org/GGHamilton.htm
"The puffers landed on the shore, they beached on the shore. It was quite something to see, but you didn’t think much of it at the time because that’s the way they operated. They were flat on the bottoms, they were just like big baths...To see them it was really quite something and, as a child, you couldn’t keep away from them. They were quite happy for you to go into the engine room, they would show you around, there wasn’t Health and Safety then you know. You were up the ladder and onto it and they would show you around the puffer. I remember there was one man, MacFadyen, he was a very famous Lismore MacFadyen, and he was on the Glen Cloy. I remember one time he phoned up in the morning, to my father, and he said, ‘I’ll be in at a quarter past three.’ This was in July and the mist was down, you couldn’t see, it was just black. I was sent with a note down to the ferry [on Ulva], to tell the ferryman that the puffer was coming in at quarter past three. The ferryman said, ‘He’ll not be in today’. Anyhow, it stayed misty all day, so we went away to see if this puffer would appear at quarter past three.
"Quarter past three, are they not round the Ard Point ‘Honk, honk, honk!’ – the puffer appeared! And he came in and he waited off for about an hour and then beached at the right time. And he came in and I remember the ferryman saying to this fellow, ‘Had you no mist?’. ‘Oh aye, we had mist, it was misty all the way.’ He said, ‘We never saw Iona.’ Of course, there was nothing but a compass on those things. And there was a chair sitting out of the wheelhouse on the deck and this young fellow said, ‘Oh aye, he was sitting out on the chair there. The skipper was sitting on the chair there all the way, from the time we left Crinan, with a watch. And he was telling me how many degrees to go each way. And he was listening to the rocks, to the swell breaking on the Torran rocks as he went through on each side and he would say, so much this way, so much that way. That was him, aye, he was quite famous. MacBrayne’s captains that were on these boats too, you know, they had only a compass."
Adapted from an interview with Hugh MacPhail, Callachally, Mull (April 2019) From episode 25 of the podcast What We Do in the Winter produced by Alasdair Satchel.
More information on visiting the area can be found here.