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Diving for scallops - bill campbell

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Within my first few moments of meeting Bill Campbell, I was invited into the cozy living room of his house for a coffee.  I sat down with Bill and his wife and sipped on my steaming mug, happy to escape the cool, damp weather outside for a moment, and listened while Bill told me his story.  Bill is 71 years old (at the time of my writing this) and originally came from outside of Perth, but he has been a resident of Jura for the past 40 years.  Every week, Bill goes diving for scallops in the frigid waters of the bay.  He has a small boat which he moors off the Pier and takes to different areas of the bay, where he dives down to harvest king scallops, dislodging them with his huge weathered hands and placing them in a net bag.  The scallops that he doesn’t eat himself or give away, he keeps in their net bag in the water, suspended from a rope tied securely to the pilings of the pier.  Once a week, a man comes around to buy his scallops, taking them fresh back to Glasgow and selling them to a restaurant there.  After Bill and I spoke, he drove me to the pier to show me his week’s catch.  His parting gift to me was a half dozen scallops and instructions to take them back with me to the Jura Hotel so the chef could prepare them for my dinner.  He did, and they were excellent.