Cumbrae Pontoons

What do you do when you have very little money but a million things needing done? You ask for help and often it is provided. This was the case with the chance to transform access to the water at Pinkston. When initially build Pinkston had 3 small grey pontoon blocks installed. While useable, these were always a bottleneck and there were clearly other locations where more access points could be useful.

Around this time the permanent closure of Cumbrae Watersports centre was announced. Catherine Brown, a voluntary trustee contacted SportScotland about the possibility of obtaining some pontoons. Although agreed it became clear that bringing them back was not going to be simple. After decades in the sea on the Firth of Clyde they had been dragged onto shore but still needed split apart, cleaned, repaired and also brought back to the mainland on the ferry.

With no staff budget or time, a local club that used Pinkston, Drumchapel and Clydebank Kayak Club (dckc.co.uk) rounded up some volunteers and Alan, Graham and Danny spent 3 days in the rain splitting, hauling and loading pontoons, eventually bringing almost 300 back to Glasgow including one trip by a lorry as well as many van loads. With a cost new of over £30,000 the value of their sheer hard work has allowed us to create a number of launch points, build the pitch divider which helps us safely operate in the basin on windy days and enabled the building of the beach area for the accessibility pontoon. We still have some blocs to plastic weld to repair some holes and these are earmarked for further access improvements.