For many years Peter Buchan was the voice of Scotland's North-East fishing communities, dispensing wisdom and good humour in his poems and short stories which were published regularly from the mid-1940s to 1991. This book contains 116 short stories, including all those which appeared in Fit Like, Skipper?

A great interest in people provided the main source of his inspiration to write: 'Human naitur', he called it, and his observations around his home town of Peterhead, and further afield, in fishing ports such as Stornoway and Yarmouth, resulted in the many marvellous character studies now collected in this volume.

Peter Buchan was unique, writing mostly in the North-East dialect, exactly as he spoke it every day of his life. He was one of the caretakers of this rich and beautiful language and he used it with great skill to describe the lives of fisher folk.

Peter Buchan was born in Peterhead in 1917, the son of a fisherman. Educated at Peterhead Academy, he was off to sea on a fishing boat as soon as he left school at the age of sixteen and he spent most of his life amongst boats. In 1940 he married Agnes Cowe, a Peterhead quine.

After the war he started writing poems. A collection, Mount Pleasant, appeared in 1961 and reprinted six times. He then started to write short stories to portray the 'middle ground' in fisher life which had formerly been portrayed at the two extremes of either drunkenness or religious fanaticism and he found a large readership for his work at home and abroad. He broadcast regularly on radio and was interviewed several times on television. He was Vice-President of the Buchan Heritage Society from 1988-1990, then Patron until his death. He also edited five editions of the Society's magazine, Heirskip, from 1987-91.

Peter died on 12 December 1991 and is buried in Peterhead.