Two men are missing after a fishing boat sank in Loch Fyne. You can only pray for a miracle.
To people living in the Central Belt this means little. Their day in the workplace will start on Friday as it did the day before. To people who live in the rural and coastal communities of Scotland, where a lot of men depend on fishing for their livelihood, this news sends a shiver down the spine.
I remember well when four young men were lost from the small community of Iona. That was in 1998.
The Independent got it right: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-lost-sons-of-iona-1191467.html
I'm not sure what happened next. These young men were young: the next generation of parents and grandparents. Can a small community recover from that kind of loss? I know that Iona at that time needed a teacher for its primary school and an Argyll teacher volunteered to move to the island and stayed there for a few years. The island's community council advertised for people to come and live there. Did it work? Is the community recovering? I hope so.
Further back, three young men were lost when fishing off Islay. They often went out on the boat together. The weather was fine and there was no reason to expect a problem, But later the weather turned bad: an Islay mist came down. I remember standing in my back garden in Bowmore and hearing the helicopter flying over towards the local hospital. Like everyone else, I hoped someone had been found alive. But that wasn't the outcome.
One of the young men missing was a former pupil from the high school. One was the son of the school secretary in the same school. The third was the badminton partner of a colleague's wife.
In the case of Loch Fyne, I'm still hoping for a miracle.
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