As part of Aberdeen’s Festival of the Sea 2024, we created a special series of our Harbour Voices podcast. The second episode in this series features an interview with Willie Deas, skipper of The Reaper - a former Fifie Sailing Herring Drifter.

This type of boat was the most popular design of fishing boat on the East Coast of Scotland for the greater part of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Today The Reaper is the flagship of the Scottish Fisheries Museum, Reaper and is berthed in Anstruther harbour outside the Museum. She is now equipped as a floating museum of the herring industry and sailed to Aberdeen to be part of the Festival of the Sea programme.

In this episode Wille shares his lifetime of knowledge of The Reaper, fishing industry and the sea.

Fisherman Hans Unkles wants a different way of doing things. With a band of fellow eco-aware fishermen, he took apart his old boat and refited it with cutting-edge electronic tech. In this Harbour Voices podcast we take a deep dive with Hans into his building, learning, making mistakes, chopping and welding a path to an easier, and more environmentally friendly way of fishing.

Chris Gove has a long family history linked with Old Torry and many fabulous stories of the Aberdeen’s harbour and fishing industry to tell. This extended version of his previous episode of Harbour Memories captures of few of the best.