St OLA

This lifesaver is in the Stromness Museum.
This will be from the St. Ola II.

The St.Ola I is remembered in the 'About Orkney' website : .....
In the war it was harder to get aboard her. If you were in the services – and who wasn’t? – they’d shove you aboard a big transport rather, when it came to your leave. But the St Ola carried on, a black speck bobbing up and down. She was there on the horizon every time, so that you came to look for her, as you would for The Plough or the North Star, steadfast landmarks in a reeling world. The Ola would be there.
For that matter, she’d been there in the first war too. Day in, day out, on her round. Nodding to such great names as Warspite, Centurion, Iron Duke, under Jellicoe’s eye in Scapa Flow. Even on the tremendous midsummer eve, when the fateful Hampshire sailed to her doom and all the Valkyries rode the storm, the St Ola was out, on her round – up to her gun’le in foam, no doubt, and over it, just as often, but on her usual. Off Hoy, that’s where you’d look for her the time the Hampshire was sending her escort back with “Weather too foul for destroyers.” If you’d turned your glass on the Old Man of Hoy, that’s where the Ola’d been about then. That black speck – yes, there she is! – Wallowing!
Even when you did get aboard her in this last war, it wasn’t as plain sailing as you’d have thought. The St Ola had always some surprise up her sleeve – an individual ship! And this time – those queer, dark things breaking surface, astoundingly close, now and then? “Drifting mines,” said the mate curtly. “You’re safer on the transports.” But the Ola delicately picked her way. No radar for her; no wireless either. Hadn’t she even a gun? Well – yes – when the Navy mistook her for a target and fired potshots at her (unsuccessfully) one blue morning in the Firth – she’d asked for a gun then. And did she ever fire it? And, most intriguingly of all, did she ever hit?
How your imagination raced at the lively picture that conjured up. It helped to shorten the passage.
Though that – unexpectedly enough – seemed this time all too short, so that when you left her at Scrabster Pier, it was like leaving an old friend. And you looked back, at the turn of the Scrabster road – for the little black thing bobbing!