Captain George Porteous, who lived at Hopedale, Stromness, retired in 1935 from his position as Commodore Skipper of the King Line shipping company, while still in his early 40s. He acquired the old Hoxa Head, a motorboat operating out of St Margaret’s Hope, which acted as mail boat meeting the St Ola off Hoxa Head and delivering to South Ronaldsay and Burray. She was a fairly old lady when he acquired her in 1934. Close to 40ft in length, she was totally gutted and re-designed as a seven berth motor yacht. She was powered by a heavy-duty Kelvin (petrol paraffin) engine and could do 7 knots, helped along with auxiliary mainsail and jib. She was renamed ‘Bounty’.
In 1938, the Bounty made a trip round Cape Wrath down to the Clyde as part of a family adventure to visit the Empire Exhibition. Following the success of this trip, a second trip down the West Coast and the Western Isles took place in 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War.
After the war and stripped of her peacetime livery, the Bounty went on to provide loyal service to the local Sea Cadet Force.
On moving to live in Hopedale, Archie Bevan, who was a nephew of Captain Porteous, and had been a young member of crew on the West Coast adventurers, ‘inherited’ the Bounty’s dinghy. Built by expert ships carpenter James Sabiston of Hilldyke, Flotta, in 1936, the dinghy survived into a new century and provided many happy memories for two further generations of the Bevan family, before being gifted to the Orkney Boat Museums (Orkney Museum and Heritage Service).
