The Council Maritime Affairs Committee voted 5-2 this morning to fund position-reporting beacons for all fishing vessels under 20 metres operating from Bobington harbour. The allocation of 19,800 florins from the maritime safety reserve will equip approximately 90 boats within six weeks.

Alderman Jessamine Cole, who chairs the committee, called the vote after 40 minutes of debate — brisk by committee standards, and a reflection of how thoroughly the Harbour Authority Board’s unanimous mandate on Tuesday had narrowed the question from whether to how.

“The principle was settled on Tuesday,” Cole said afterwards. “Today was about arithmetic.”

The arithmetic resolved as follows. The committee adopted a modified version of the full-council-funding proposal advanced by vessel master Percy Dalgleish at Tuesday’s Board meeting. The maritime safety reserve — funded from an existing surcharge on commercial harbour fees — will cover the full cost of equipment and installation. A modest annual maintenance levy of 12 florins per vessel will be introduced to sustain the programme over its five-year warranty period.

Ashwater Signal Works, Bobington’s own maritime signal manufacturer, was selected over the Port Caravel-based Harland Maritime Instruments. The Signal Works units cost 220 florins per unit — 25 florins more than the Harland alternative — but come with a five-year warranty and local service capability. Alderman Cole noted that a fishing vessel with a faulty beacon in January does not benefit from a warranty that requires shipping the unit to Port Caravel.

“Buy local and maintain local,” she said. “That is the committee’s preference.”

Reg Compton, the 63-year-old boatwright who offered at Tuesday’s Board meeting to perform installations at cost, will coordinate the fitting programme. He expects to begin next week and to complete the fleet within six weeks, working with two apprentices from Hallam & Stroud.

The two dissenting votes came from Alderman Drayton, who argued the maritime safety reserve should not be drawn down in a year when the tramway bond prospectus is under rating agency review, and Alderman Fenwick, who preferred the shared-cost model.

Dalgleish, who had argued at Tuesday’s meeting that fishermen should not bear the full cost of safety equipment — “We feed this city,” he told the Board — was in the public gallery this morning. He left without speaking to reporters, but was seen shaking Compton’s hand in the corridor.

Harbour Master Cornelius Ashby, who attended in an advisory capacity, described the vote as “exactly right.”

“This is not a complicated decision,” Ashby said. “A man went missing for 36 hours because his radio broke and no one knew where he was. Now we will know where they all are.”

He was referring to the Lady Maren incident of 9 March, when Captain Dermot Shale and three crew members drifted for a day and a half with a fractured crankshaft and a broken radio aerial. All four were recovered alive. The incident prompted the Fishermen’s Benevolent Association’s unanimous vote for mandatory beacons on 12 March, which led to Tuesday’s Authority Board mandate and today’s funding decision.

From petition to funding: seven days.