Notes from 'The Episcopal Chapel at Muchalls' by John Paul Hill, A.R. Mowbray & Co., Ltd, London, 1956

PP 79-80  -	Notes from Muchalls Register of Deaths
1868 - Andrew Christie and John Leiper. Both were young men...went out to sea on the morning of 8th April (Wednesday before Easter)...sudden squall capsized boat between 3 and 4 miles from land... Andrew Christie was thrown out...John Leiper washed off. Three older men picked off the wreck... by another Stranathra boat.

Good Friday was calm and all the Skateraw boats and the Stranathra ones all turned out...body of Andrew Christie found ...by the boat of Robert Masson (55 Skateraw) and that of William Christie (3? Skateraw), who had a long line managed by the two boats which swept a great space of sea bottom.

The afternoon tide served and there came 8 boats from Dunies (Downies) to assist in the search...John Leiper's body was also found by the same two boats and the same line.

The line which was so serviceable was an ordinary great line - with great line hooks arranged in bunches of five, like creepers and each cluster fixed on the line by strong tippies at the distance of two and a half feet apart. The line was weighted with sinkers to keep it at the bottom. It was Robert Masson (15 Skateraw) who arranged the line in this way.

P 77 - A writer in the "Church Magazine" of 1867 says of the coastal villages:

"Their inhabitants were, for the most part - in some villages to a man - hereditary churchmen, whose ancestors adhered to the clergy who were dispossessed of their livings... consequent on the revolution of 1688...The northern villages, however, in the course of time, and from varying causes, conformed to the new system established by law"

P83 - The middle of the 19th Century

"The fishermen at Skateraw, Stranathra and Cowie were nearly all Episcopalians, and at Findon, Portlethen and the Dunies, almost wholly Presbyterian.