Meet Luke Dunstan, director of Bristol Packet Boat Trips
I was raised in Banwell, Somerset, but my main connection to the city is of course the Bristol Packet, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary. Some of my earliest memories are helping my mother put sausages on sticks for the catering and helping my dad on the boat.
I like the fact that Bristol is a bite-sized city. It still feels friendly, like a village. It has a vibrancy that rivals any other international city, plus it has great access to the surrounding countryside.
On a Friday afternoon, I join a lot of the other boat builders for a debrief at our local pub The Orchard on Hanover Place. It’s right next to the dockyard and marina, which is where we
do a lot of our work. I love that little pub. I’ve also recently been enjoying exploring the many little mediaeval churches we have dotted around the city.
I do a lot of marine engineering at the moment. My average day could involve servicing pumps, doing oil changes, fixing broken machinery, and generally maintaining the boats so everything runs smoothly. We have five boats and the floating café, so our total fleet is made up of seven boats, and they all work really hard, with hundreds of passengers going on them. They need constant attention to keep them afloat and shipshape.
Our original boat was the Redshank when Bristol Packet started in 1974. Then the Tower Belle came along, then we had the Flower of Bristol, then Bagheera and then the Hydrogenesis, which runs on hydrogen fuel cells. We want to move away from our reliance on diesel and the internal combustion engine to make sure we’re more sustainable going forward and find alternative methods of propulsion. We’re currently in the middle of a project to electrify the Redshank with an electric motor and battery propulsion system. We hope the knowledge gained from this will mean can do the same to the whole fleet over the next decade.
We marked 50 years with a celebration. I know – along with my business partner Giles Thomson, who I’d like to give a special shout-out to – how much hard work has gone on in the background all this time selling tickets, scheduling trips, running the crew, doing the accounts, marketing and then all the practical work that goes into keeping the boats afloat and maintained, so the crew deserve a great party.
The River Avon and harbour are important because they keep us connected to the sea. They’ve enabled us to keep maritime skills and professions alive in the city – although it’s smaller than it would have been when it was a working port.
The Redshank, which is the original Bristol Packet boat, singlehandedly kept the UK’s inland waterway systems alive during the 1960s and into the very early 1970s. It was the last ever narrow boat to take a shipment of coal up and down the Grand Union Canal once a week, which actually kept the canal system alive. Then after that, there was an influx of money and inspiration to reopen all the waterways. And now they’ve become incredibly popular, with holidaymakers and boaters enjoying the whole, wonderful canal network that we have in this country.
We’re collecting photos, stories and memories from the last 50 years because lots of people have held their celebrations on board our boats. The harbour has changed so much in 50 years. It’s just the quay walls themselves that are the same, everything along the side of them has changed. I can remember it being a derelict wasteland with bushes, piles of coal and little sheds, warehouses and workshops all over the place with old bits of machinery left behind. Now of course we have a modern façade, but you can still see all the history in the quay walls and feel the history that was here.
Share your photos and memories of celebrations on the Bristol Packet boats via social media @bristolpacket. More info: bristolpacket.co.uk
