Tag Archives: harbour master

OLD GIT WATCH

DOCKS: WHERE’S OUR MONEY?

News that Bristol City Council is forking out £100k on a review of their Harbour Service run by our old Harbour Master friend, Cap’n Tony “Ahab” Nicholls, is raising a few eyebrows. This is the fourth review of the Cap’n’s bent and useless service since 2014!

This latest review will be undertaken by Fisher Advisory “an international consultancy with extensive experience providing specialist management consultancy in the maritime, multimodal and aviation sectors” at a cost to the council taxpayer of over £100k.

This follows an alleged review of the service by former Property boss Robert “Spunkface” Orrett in 2014. The secretive results of which are lost in the mists of time. A further review was undertaken by Bristol Energy architect Bill “Dick” Edrich in 2018. Again, no results have ever been seen, while Edrich sloped off to the private sector when his expensive Bristol Energy farce started falling apart.

Idiot former Director of Commercialisation Penny “Hell” Fell launched a review in September 2019 promising to deliver a report in July 2021 that would “turn the loss-making waterway into a lucrative attraction”! This review, too, never appeared after Fell scarpered in 2020 after writing a highly misleading pre-election Cabinet report for the Reverend on the financial state of Bristol Energy in January 2020.

This latest docks review comes after news early last year that Ahab is unable to account for £100k of public money described as “fees not charged” in an Internal Audit report published in January 2021. This report also highlights “closed practices and poor management arrangements”, which sounds like polite euphemisms for corruption to us.

Will this latest report have the balls to actually publish what’s been blatantly obvious for years? That Ahab is a dishonest and underqualified bullying incompetent who needs to go.

DICK ED NEXT TO TACKLE DOCKS SHAMBLES

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“Dick” Edrich: the latest boss drafted in to sort out the council’s docks and markets shambles

Over FOUR YEARS after we told them so, Bristol City Council finally notice that their HARBOUR OFFICE and MARKETS SERVICE are expensively mismanaged basketcases.

The council is now threatening some sort of ACTION after finally publicly acknowledging, “poor governance arrangements; a poorly managed balance between commercial rigour and democratic accountability; a failure to maintain the Harbour assets and poor management” at its Harbour Office.

This comes four years after The BRISTOLIAN revealed that turd in human form, Harbour Master, Cap’n Tony “Ahab” Nichol, was a serial and, apparently, unsackable BULLY who has got away with MULTIPLE BULLYING OFFENCES towards staff over many years.

The docks infrastructure that he’s responsible for, meanwhile, remains at near-collapse after years of CHRONIC MISMANAGEMENT by underqualified Ahab and his handpicked team of clueless over-promoted supervisors and absent civil engineers.

We’re told that Bill “Dick” Edrich – the man who helped set up the loss-making Bristol Energy fiasco – has been urgently drafted in to BANG HEADS TOGETHER at the Harbour Master’s Office and in Markets, managed, for no coherent reason, by one of Ahab’s hapless minions in recent years.

However, those with longer memories may recall that recently departed property boss, Robert “SPUNKFACE” Orrett, was similarly ordered by Mayor No More Red Trousers – back in 2014 – to sort out the embarrassing management shambles exposed by The BRISTOLIAN in docks and markets.

Although the opposite happened when Spunkface left Ahab to reorganise the docks service as he saw fit. Ahab then used the opportunity to FIRE any experienced workers who had complained about his bullying and incompetence while ensuring his useless crew of management and supervisory bullies were kept on with enhanced salaries.

We can probably look forward to not much happening for a few years yet then

BOG WANKING BOSS BANS BOATS FROM BOAT FEST

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With just a week to go until our annual Harbour Festival, it’s time for Bristol City Council and its prize turd in human form, the Hitler of the harbour, Cap’n Tony “Ahab” Nichol, to treat some Bristol residents LIKE SHIT in order to facilitate some vacuous piece of old crap for the WEALTHY and PRIVILEGED.

This year’s victims are the 30-odd boat-owning residents of HANNOVER QUAY who have been instructed by Harbour Master Ahab, still apparently struggling with his considerable number of mental health issues, to shift their homes out of the way to the end of the harbour at Poole’s Wharf for TEN DAYS during a festival that’s supposed to celebrate, er, boats and our harbour.

We understand these residents are being uprooted so that Ahab and his tragic council management mates and hangers-on can move a SUPER YACHT on to Hannover Quay for the weekend so they can spend time aboard the vessel getting pissed and tugging each other off in style.

Perhaps they’ll be celebrating Ahab’s oversight of the dodgy repair of the Princes Street Swing Bridge? This only took him about THREE YEARS, cost MILLIONS and, we’re reliably assured, “will last about FIVE MINUTES“! Or perhaps they’ll raise a glass to Ahab’s last round of staff cuts, which created 1.25 bosses to every member of working staff accompanied by an unprecedented rise in the DEATH TOLL in his docks?

The boat owners are, of course, livid. Not least because there’s NO ELECTRICITY at Poole’s Wharf, which means the council are treating their long-term paying customers to ten days of living in the dark and eating cold food in the arse end of the harbour while they all enjoy themselves. What’s not to like?

The boat owners are also less than impressed that the consultation they were promised months ago by Bristol City Council prior to any move NEVER MATERIALISED. Instead Ahab – who only has a job because an investigation into his systematic workplace bullying practices in 2014 was called off because it took so long the investigator had retired – simply wandered down to Hannover Quay one day and INSTRUCTED the boat owners to leave or else.

Subsequent complaints to Ahab have all fallen on DEAF EARS, not least because he’s actually very, very ill and isn’t mentally capable of giving a fuck about people. But that’s only when boat owners have managed to get hold him at all. “He’s been spending a lot of time lately in the Harbour Office toilet with his prized copy of ‘Superyacht’ magazine,” we’re told.

“He’s not known around the Harbour Office as “crispy trousers” for nothing”!

WE’RE SUNK!

Stark scenes confronted the dock staff on the morning 23 March this year.

Where once a fourth emergency service vessel sat moored there was now a partly sunken walkway with an even more sunken Harbour Master’s engineer’s boat, The Albion, attached to it.

Several members of the dock team reported back in September that The Albion was holed above the waterline but docks boss Cap’n Tony ‘Ahab’ Nichols, in his infinite wisdom, decided not to fix it until its anual service due in May.

Since then the docks have laid off their experienced, qualified and ticketed team in preferring inexperienced managers, who left the damaged boat loaded over the weekend. Presumably getting home early on a Friday afternoon is a priority for managers, not the safety and security of out boats and harbour?

It beggars belief that while we’re being force fed rising tide and flood risk stories the City Council can be so blase about our safety.

We’re pretty sure it says somewhere in Cap’n Ahab’s job description that he’s supposed to keep the boats afloat. Are we getting value for money from council cuts? Certainly the Albion has cost us an extra bob or two and the essential vessel was out of action for weeks.