Welcome to Heydays’ blog which hopefully will take us on adventures as we expand our sailing horizons. We will try to share the highs and lows and hope that friends will share some of them with us.
If you want to read some of the stories from our first year (before the genesis of this blog) we’ll write stuff as it occurs to us in the FIRST YEAR WITH HEYDAYS pages…
We’ve decided to leave the boat here in Ullapool while we scoot back south for July. There’s a good bus service to Inverness, where the car is, and more importantly it’s a sensible jumping off point for our planned trip to the Outer Hebrides and the Small Isles in August, where, hopefully, Chris will join us.
We arranged for a water taxi to bring us ashore in time for the 10am bus to Inverness. On the radio, checking whether they’d called us, we hear another yacht asking if there’s space on a pontoon, having watched someone leave. We put the same question to the harbourmaster and get the same answer, yes, there’s a berth, and yes, they can take us. We’re fond of lying to a mooring in surroundings like these, but we need diesel, water, and to get a few things sorted before the drive home, so a pontoon is genuinely useful, and there’s a happy side effect for the local economy too, since we end up spending rather more ashore. Overindulgence in the pub is not, after all, ideal preparation for a dinghy ride back to the boat in fading light.
With indecent haste, Heydays slips the mooring buoy and motors towards the harbour. The harbourmaster is waiting and puts us onto a berth normally kept for the tenders ferrying cruise passengers ashore. We’ll have a couple of nights here before returning to the mooring, where she’ll sit snugly for the next month.
On our earlier call, the harbourmaster had mentioned, almost in passing, that their laundry and shower facilities are “the best in Scotland.” Tied up and squared away, we wander over to the office and are met by an enthusiastic, helpful team who are clearly proud of what’s been done for visiting boats. The whole harbour has been done up properly, and it’s a genuine pleasure to be here. We can’t speak for the rest of Scotland, but they are, without question, the best facilities we’ve come across so far.
We’d pre booked bus tickets on a tip from Ian and Maureen aboard Andiamo, and it proves an excellent piece of advice, the bus back is packed with passengers fresh off the Stornoway ferry.
Back in Inverness, we pick up a couple of decent carabiners, ready for a trial run up the mast using a borrowed mast climbing system.
The forecast had threatened wet and windy, but back in Ullapool there’s barely a hint of rain and conditions are calm enough, so up the mast it is. Deep joy.
This means getting into the bosun’s chair, an item that looks and feels like a giant blue nappy and carries roughly the same amount of dignity. We hoist a line with the mast climber attached, and fix a prusik knot to the chair. The system works like this: sit in the chair, feet into the straps, then stand, which raises and locks a foot bar beneath you. From standing, you push the prusik up the line, sit back down, and repeat the cycle all the way to the top. The YouTube video made it look entirely straightforward.
Reality was fine to begin with, though the YouTube mast had, conveniently, none of the clutter ours has, halyards, winches, cleats, all needing to be negotiated on the way up, and the result was a certain amount of unnerving see sawing early on. Relax, James, we’re only two metres off the deck. Next, the descent. The theory is that you sit back in the chair as before, then lift your feet with a twisting motion to unlock the foot bar, while simultaneously pressing down to release the prusik. Sadly, my ankles and knees turn out not to be quite double jointed enough for the manoeuvre, and instead of descending, I continue, mysteriously, to inch upward. A small audience on the dockside takes a renewed interest in proceedings.
Fortunately, John is on hand, releases the foot bar from below, and I begin inching back down, which, thankfully, works. Had this happened at the top of the mast rather than two metres up, John would have been considerably less on hand. A rethink is clearly required, and in any case, mast climbing is overrated. We do our best to look composed, as though this had been the plan all along, and retreat below. Lunchtime, conveniently.
Ullapool itself is lovely and seems to be thriving. We stumble on a little courtyard called The Seafood Shack, which comes with the considerable bonus of a small gin bar shed serving Loch Achall Gin, distilled nearby at Rhidorroch Distillery. Both food and gin are excellent, tempura battered haddock in a wrap, monkfish stew, langoustines, all cooked properly and priced fairly.
The rest of the afternoon goes on laundry, sparing us the indignity of hauling dirty washing home and back again. A domestic chore of a paragraph, this one.
There’s a bar and restaurant near the ferry terminal, name withheld, since I don’t believe in saying anything unless it’s broadly kind. We were shown to a couple of uncomfortable bar stools, despite fourteen of the sixteen tables sitting empty, and charged £7 a pint for Guinness. Six langoustines, we noted, came to £39. We left, and went instead to The Arch Inn, a genuinely friendly pub with views over the loch, where Guinness was £5.50. The Seafood Shack, by contrast, charged £14 for five langoustines. Just saying. The good places are out there, just not always the obvious ones. Ullapool in the evening sunshine is lovely…
Sunday morning dawns bright, and we need to clear our pontoon berth to make way for tenders from an incoming cruise ship. With the weather holding, we decide to explore Isle Martin and Loch Kanaird instead. We slip away and are soon sailing in a fresh but distinctly changeable breeze, the steep sided loch and valleys throwing down sudden downdrafts and gusts with little warning. Still, a fine morning to be sailing. CalMac makes its usual scheduled appearance, and just as we bear away towards the island, the cruise liner rounds the headland behind us, we’re simply glad to be out of Ullapool for the day.
The coastline and surrounding islets are wonderfully craggy, riven with deep fissures in the rock. The bay behind the island offers good shelter, with just one other yacht at anchor. The cliffs drop almost sheer into the sea, and even fifty metres or so off the shore we’re still showing twenty metres on the depth sounder, a world away from the muddy shoals we’re used to in the Solent. We finally drop the hook in ten metres, close enough that a decent run up might just get you ashore. We’re only stopping for lunch, in any case, with the wind nudging us steadily off the land.
A couple of houses, an old ruin, and a small pier, and that’s the whole of Isle Martin accounted for. It’s a wonderfully peaceful anchorage, and it’s a shame we can’t stay the night, since a night here would be close to perfect.
The run back is lazy, the breeze comfortably behind us, and we slide past the shore…
…though the cruise ship now dominates the skyline, dwarfing the little town entirely and trailing the usual steady plume of generator exhaust, blowing away from us, fortunately.
We tie up again on the mooring buoy, where Heydays will sit for the next few weeks while we head south to renew acquaintance with houses, family, and friends.
As we have our dinner in the last of the evening sunshine, the cruise liner leaves taking its constant toing and froing tenders and exhaust smoke with it. We suppose that cruise ships are good for the gift shops, but probably less so for the eateries and the rest of the town….
Just a couple of cormorants and a gig to keep us company…
This is the last entry for a month or so, so I trust our reader can contain their excitement in the meantime.
Footnote:….solstice sunset over Loch Broom…
Friday promises strongish southerlies, but today suggests some south easterly, at least at the start of the afternoon.
The south going tide starts around 2 so we decide to see if we can have a decent sail down to Ullapool. Safe to say, the forecasts are not entirely accurate… the promised winds from anywhere east of South fail to materialise, in fact almost any wind remains a forlorn hope as we motor out into the Minch into a seascape of several shades of grey…and not even the slightly racy shades…. This is more like Rothko in his latter years, when he eschewed colour for huge canvases, entirely filled with blocks of varying greys and black. We assume he must have spent time up here. But the internet does not confirm our suspicions.
From time to time we are taunted by a glimmer of a lighter shade of grey, and a moments pause in the drizzle. In the summer, this craggy coastline must be beautiful ….oh….this is summer. The mist hangs low but starkly beautiful over the craggy tops…
Never mind, we always enjoy the ride, despite the fact that even the usually reliable guillemots don’t bother to keep us company, just the occasional grumpy cormorant.
Actually, the sky brightens as we turn into Loch Broom, and we start to see a few more boats, and the CalMac ferry nosing out as we make our final approach.
Ullapool looks quite appealing, but for us tonight, no room on the pontoon so we pick up a mooring buoy. As the rain comes down the valley once more, we decide that the bright lights and booze ashore can wait. A trip across in the dinghy is less appealing than gin, dinner and being gently rocked…
Footnote…despite the apparent lack of excitement from the writer of this, we are still really happy and content on the old girl….better than being among the huddled masses of campervans lining the shore…
Sailing, it has to be said, is a largely sedentary pursuit. There are bursts of real effort…fenders, lines, sails, as we leave or enter a harbour, and precious little in between. On a long passage, the most strenuous task of the day is often just nipping below to put the kettle on. Yes, a lumpy sea demands constant bracing, but nobody’s pretending that counts as cardio.
So we resolve to spend at least a day in Lochinver, with vague ambitions of a hill walk if the weather allows, and no great objection if it doesn’t.
Annoyingly, there’s a job up the mast that can’t be put off any longer. We’ve got a wireless wind instrument on the way out, and entirely in keeping with Heydays’ character, the original anemometer still up there alongside it, having served faithfully for as long as we’ve known her. Lately, though, it’s been telling us fibs…wind clearly on our left cheek, instrument insisting it’s coming from astern. A look aloft suggests it’s rotated on its spindle, very possibly the work of a passing bird with no respect for instrumentation.
We idly wondered yesterday afternoon whether now might be the moment to go up and sort it. Unhelpfully, the pontoon beside us is occupied by a couple of boats with young crews and weathered-looking skippers, exactly the audience nobody wants. Going up a mast is never dignified, and it always draws a crowd. We still carry the scar tissue from a sunny afternoon in Dartmouth, watched by several dozen ice-cream-licking spectators, all presumably hoping for a dropped spanner or an ungainly plunge. Not keen to repeat the performance, we fall back on the old principle that any properly seasoned sailor should be able to feel the wind and trim accordingly. Technology, we decide, is overrated.
With our pontoon neighbours gone and the weather looking kind, we drag ourselves up for a walk round the village and along the River Inver. The fish dock is heaving, a large trawler is landing a serious catch, and the harbourmaster tells us she belongs to the French supermarket chain Intermarché. The fish goes straight into sealed crates and onto lorries headed for France. Two big Spanish boats are expected on the same basis before long: trawling international waters, but landing in the UK because it’s cheaper to truck the catch to Europe afterwards than to sail it there.
Despite the very commercial nature of the fish dock, the loch itself is very pretty and with reminders of an older style of life still around…
James fails entirely to steer John and Yee Tak past the butcher’s window, where a large piece of venison has clearly been waiting for them all morning. What follows is several minutes (possibly hours) of earnest deliberation over what, exactly, one does with a haunch like that. The village itself is buzzing, full of campervans and motorbikes doing the North Coast 500 circuit, and it’s obviously a lifeline for a place this size.
The Inver is in full spate, and we follow it upstream past roaring waterfalls, a weir, and a string of rocky pools, some of them clearly man-made, presumably for the benefit of the salmon fishing rather than the salmon.
Eventually the path peels away from the river and we’re out into wild, empty hill country behind the village, nothing but deer fences for company.
…and a very brave little toad…
The loch above the village is calm and lovely in the early afternoon sun…
…and then we turn finally for home with a definite sense of having earned the venison waiting for 2 of us.
It’s a place that rewards you from both directions, land and sea, and we count ourselves lucky to have seen it from both. But tomorrow this should be back to a sailing blog about sailing…
The weather window looks promising, a few days of settled southerlies or south-westerlies across the Minch, which is about as good as it gets up here.
Kinlochbervie is a gem, but a small one. The hills are calling, and under other circumstances we’d answer, but the calendar has us in its unforgiving grip, and we decide to press on to Lochinver, a short hop really, from Ullapool, where Heydays will hopefully sit quietly at rest while we scoot south for July.
A wander round the village turns up some lovely beaches and two cafés, which, combined with the steady trickle of campervans, confirms this is firmly on the North Coast 500 circuit.
There’s also a sizeable trawler alongside, disgorging 1,700 crates of Ling and Monkfish with impressive efficiency. She came in around half six, swapped crews at some point, and was back out through the heads by noon, ruthlessly commercial, and slightly dispiriting for the smaller boats trying to scratch a living alongside her.
As she leaves, another comes in…
Yet the dock and its infrastructure tell a once, more optimistic story… ice plant, lock-up garages, decent facilities, all clearly intended to welcome boats of every size. We pass a pleasant few minutes with a local who’s heading out to lift his prawn and lobster pots further up the loch. There are, it seems, still gaps in the market.
The forecast for the Minch, meanwhile, proves to be, how to put this charitably, aspirational. The apps had promised a nice beam reach to Stoer Head on a decent south-easterly. What we get is glassy calm and the unmistakeable sound of diesel. Sorry, Joshua. The engine gets its moment.
In fairness, it’s hard to grumble. The calm gives us time to sit back and revel in this extraordinary coastline, ragged, ancient, barely populated, with beaches that would be heaving with sunloungers anywhere south of Inverness.
The guillemots have colonised the cliffs, and they seem to play chicken (guillemot??) with us as there are hundreds sitting communing in sociable rafts, leaving it until the last minute to flap away across the water or to dive down. We don’t seem to run any over, but we keep checking to see if we are leaving a trail of feathers behind us…
The mountains march away into the distance, and headlands come and go, some with lights and other with fanciful names …why are stacks always “Old men” of something. This one is the Old Man of Stoer…
The approach to Lochinver offers the same mild anxiety as Kinlochbervie…you aim at what looks like a solid wall of rock and trust that something will give. It does, the village opens up at the last moment, and with it a neat little dock for leisure boats, where we are soon tucked in just as the rian sweeps across….all glowered over by what we think is the very carbunkle-like Caisteal Liath mountain.
Saturday…the better part of valour?
Saturday is given over to provisioning Heydays for the passage ahead, a necessary but unromantic chore that nonetheless carries a certain satisfaction. Lockers are filled, water tanks topped up, and the various calculations of fuel, food, and contingency that precede any serious passage are worked through with appropriate care. We are saying goodbye to Stromness and Orkney, and heading back to Scotland.
The passage itself demands a lot of care. The Pentland Firth required precise timing on the way in, but leaving via Hoy Sound and then rounding Cape Wrath is, in its own way, equally unforgiving. The roosts through Hoy Sound (those short, steep, breaking seas that build where tidal streams accelerate through confined water) dictate that we must transit at or very close to slack water, or find ourselves in conditions that make progress both uncomfortable and potentially hazardous. Once clear of Hoy, the rounding of Cape Wrath introduces a further complication…we need to be at least three miles offshore to pick up the westerly-going and then south-going ebb as it sweeps around the headland, avoiding the worst of the tide race that sets up in the shallower water closer in.
The maths is sobering. Total passage time is somewhere in the region of fifteen hours…the better part of two full tidal cycles…which means stemming a foul tide for a portion of the journey however carefully we time the departure. Our preferred destination is Kinlochbervie, a working fishing harbour on the north-west coast that offers good shelter and the considerable advantage of actually existing at the end of a long day. Plan B, should the forecast deteriorate en route, is to duck into Loch Eriboll and anchor, a perfectly serviceable if somewhat anti-climactic alternative, before rounding the headland in better conditions.
Which brings us, as it always does, to the alarm. Another 0330 start. At least at this latitude and this time of year, first light will be well established by then. The more pressing question is whether sleep will come at all if we turn in at eight.
The next entry may shed some light on that.
Sunday…an executive decision…
We are all awake before the alarm. This is not the cheerful, purposeful “we’re awake” of people ready to put to sea. This is the wakefulness of people who have been lying in the dark listening to the wind building in the rigging and feeling Heydays moving restlessly on her mooring lines. The fetch from the end of the loch is short, which means the chop is modest. What it also means is that anything sufficient to produce noticeable movement at the pontoon is producing considerably more outside.
We check the forecast. Then we check it again, along with the wave predictions for the crossing. The numbers are not alarming in any real sense Force 6, gusting 7, is well within what Heydays handles perfectly well. Double-reefed main, several rolls in the genoa, and she just gets on with it. In the right circumstances this is, quite honestly, exhilarating sailing.
The right circumstances are not a fifteen-hour offshore passage starting at 0330 after a largely theoretical night’s sleep.
There is a very real difference between a brisk four-hour thrash from Lymington to Poole, where the coffee is still warm when you arrive, and the discomfort has a level of exhilaration to it,, and a long passage in the same conditions. On a short sail, Force 6 is sport. Sustained over fifteen hours, with tide races to navigate at each end, it becomes something else…a test of endurance that nobody actually asked for, producing fatigue that hampers both judgement and good temper in roughly equal measure.
We ask the question…will we, over the next 15 hours, enjoy ourselves?
We also note, in passing, that there is music on in the pub this afternoon.
The decision, when it comes, is not a difficult one. Monday’s forecast is materially better, less wind, a more manageable sea state, and the same tides. We are not behind schedule. There is no deadline, no one waiting, nothing that cannot wait another twenty-four hours.
We go back to bed.
It is, without question, the right call. The heroic option has its place. This is not it.
A lazy Sunday morning doing not much except for a bit of fettling, and then an informal bar-room session of folk, blues and americana.
Now, one or two readers will know that folk is not the favourite for James, however, in my (very) humble opinion, it is all about context….and this context was stunning. Local musicians singing in a bar…informal, but very talented…
No apologies about a few videos here, although a couple of songs were about ships…mostly with less than uplifting endings…to the boats and crew, that is, not the musicians!
…and some amazing individual voices…
Monday bright(ish) and early…
So 3.00 am is not as bad as 2.30, but only marginally. However, for the second time we had all our clothes laid out, coffee ready in the cafetiere, milk and sugar all added…all that needs to be done is throw the clothes on (hopefully in the right order), boil the kettle and then basic chores for the boat…like a well oiled, albeit slightly ancient machine…
The big benefit of these nothern latitudes at this time of year is the late evening and early morning light. We slip the lines and slide out past the ferry and on into the western end of Scapa Flow.
Really sad to be leaving Orkney again. We loved it before and it hasn’t disappointed this time…it really is a magical place, and this is the furthest north which Heydays will go on this trip.
We plan to be in the middle of the Hoy Sound around slack tide…4.30, but the first of the ebb is already starting as we enter the race. We keep steadfastly to the northern shore to avoid the worst of the race and the rough water, and finally see The Old Man of Hoy opening out as we head out into the North Atlantic.
Hoy fades astern and we have quite a big swell from the north left over from yesterdays strong winds. We revel in the last of the west going tide and the nice northerly breeze…for as long as it lasts….it’s due to veer.
We take it in turns to snooze as the morning wears on, and a couple of dolphins check us out as they meander north. The forecast was right, and the wind leaves us, so motor sailing it is with the genny furled for now…
Around noon Cape Wrath becomes clear and another milestone approaches. The breeze comes round to the east, the tide turns in our favour once more, and Heydays pushes on ever-willingly round another of this countries significant headlands.
Cape Wrath is starkly beautiful in the early afternoon light and we have company for a while in the form of a Dutch Yacht much closer in….we outpace her for a few miles (not that we are racing!) as we have much cleaner wind out here… HA!
The rugged coastline in the sun shows off brilliant pinks and we start to search for the entrance to Loch Inchard and the tiny fishing port of Kinlochbervie.
We have to trust the navigation and head for seeemingly rocky dead ends, and then just at the last minute, the harbour opens out and we tie up, tired but elated after a brilliant sail across the very north of Scotland.
Kinlochbervie is odd. It is tiny on the one hand, but clearly a huge facilty for fish on the other….we cant work this out yet.
Gin in the cockpit while the dinner is in the oven and we look back on a brilliant day on Heydays.
We had reconciled ourselves to the concerted efforts of wind and tides making it difficult to reach Westray or Rousay, but we still clung to a forlorn hope that somehow the wind would not materialise, and the fearsome standing waves, called roosts in these islands, would somehow break their regular habit since the last ice age and not rear up, as if daring us to have a go.
Rain lashing through settled it and we decided to sit out the next couple of days in Stromness. The story really began 9 years ago when we met Alan (who our avid reader will remember we caught up with yesterday) and his friend Ian in Wick prior to sailing together over the Pentland Firth (they had a dodgy engine and wanted company).
We’ve been exchanging Christmas cards (as us ancients tend to do), but had either lost or got incorrect email addresses for. We hoped to meet up, but the days of writing a letter and getting a reply by tea-time have gone…
…there was only one thing to do…drive round until we find them. We took the morning bus to Kirkwall, picked up a car and headed to Rousay, Ian and Annette’s last known address. This is not as daft as it seems as there are only 260 souls on the whole island…the only snag is that we had a house name and nothing else.
The little ferry from a tiny Jetty at Tingwall on mainland requires cars to reverse on…all 4 or perhaps max 5 of them…
…less if there’s a coach as well.
Soon we push out across the 30 minute or so crossing. We console ourselves that we are still on the water, even if it’s not our own boat.
Rousay has just one road running round the island, which is a round trip of 13 miles. We stop for lunch at a little restaurant…just about the only one..run by a Ukrainian and her partner, and try to work out where the house might be. A local doesn’t know, but we find an ancient map which has a place name on it similar to their house….and we know they have only just built it recently.
Lunch, by the way was great with views across to the neighbouring island…they even provide binoculars…
Our best guess is the other side and we set off on what is probably a wild goose chase, along the main road, which is mostly single track.
Along the way, we pass Eynhallow Sound which would have been our way in. The white water of the roosts confirms our decision, although the photo makes it look no worse than a fun water park…
We start peering up driveways and into farmyard, but no one here seems to bother putting names on their gates….and there is not a soul to ask.
We see a track, and at the top is a new house, and better still, there is a car parked. We resolve to knock and ask if they know Ian and Annette. ..
…not only do they know them…it is them!
The welcome is brilliant, and we spend the rest of the afternoon catching up and just general stuff about life on small islands.
The views are immense…
…and with a deserted beach at the end of the drive…
We leave to catch the last ferry back to mainland, just so happy that we found the needle in the haystack and have properly reconnected.
It turns out that, when sufficiently motivated, we are entirely capable of making decisions.
After considerable deliberation about what might realistically be achieved in the time available, we make contact with our old friend Alan and resolve to sail across Scapa Flow to visit him and his wife Cindy on Burray. Burray sits in a chain of islands running south from the Orkney mainland, forming the south-eastern edge of Scapa Flow, or at least, it used to. The islands were separate once, until a German U-boat took the entirely reasonable-from-their-perspective decision to slip into the harbour during the war and torpedo several British warships. Churchill’s response was characteristically unequivocal: sink old ships and large quantities of concrete between the islands, seal the gaps, and install roads on top. The Churchill Barriers are an impressive piece of wartime engineering, though they do have the rather significant side-effect of making it considerably harder to leave Scapa Flow by sea towards the eastern islands.
We allow ourselves another gentle wander around Stromness in the morning, and just take in the atmosphere of these islands…
…before catching the early afternoon tide and heading east with a moderate westerly behind us. The sail across is both leisurely and sunny, which in Scottish waters feels worthy of note. Scapa Flow opens up around us with brilliant views of huge skies almost entirely devoid of trees but entirely full of everything else…and some reminders of a harsher, bygone age…
Down south, a day like this would bring out flotillas of motorboats and justify a dozen overpriced waterside gastro-pubs. Up here, we have the Flow almost entirely to ourselves, shared only with a couple of working boats going about their business.
Rounding the headland on the south side of Burray, we find Alan waiting at the little fishing pier…
…having done the diplomatic groundwork with the local fishermen on our behalf. We are welcome to moor alongside. This is good news, as it spares us the undignified business of inflating the rubber dinghy. The pier itself was not, it must be said, designed with visiting yachts in mind, but with sufficient ingenuity and a generous quantity of string, we contrive an arrangement that sees us through two tides without incident.
It is genuinely wonderful to see Alan again. We pile into the car and drive across to South Ronaldsay, where he and Cindy have made their home with stupendous views out across the North Sea. Cindy, who is originally from South London, and James find considerable common ground in shared memories of Streatham, and, specifically, the Silver Blades Ice Rink. It clearly left a mark on South Londoners of a certain generation.
Dinner is taken a stone’s throw from Heydays at the Sands Hotel, where Alan’s biography is told over the course of the evening in a manner that puts most CVs to shame: Royal Navy, lobster fishing, running lorry-loads of shellfish to Spain, coach driving, tweed weaving, professional diving. It is the sort of life that makes us feel we have been spending our time rather inefficiently. Both Alan and Cindy speak of Orkney with real love, the word they use, unprompted, is “magical”, though the pull of grandchildren and family back in England and Scotland is ever present, and not something that even Orkney can entirely neutralise.
The following morning is bright and fresh, and by 8am, the boatyard nearby is already buzzing, having pulled the local lifeboat ashore for some work…the fishermen are long gone…
We get an impromptu lesson on the finer details of catching lobster and prawns…
…before Alan takes us to visit the newly reopened Tomb of the Eagles, a Mesolithic burial site discovered relatively recently and closed since Covid until the local community stepped in to reopen it. On our previous Orkney visit we took in the headline acts: Skara Brae, the Ring of Brodgar, the Stones of Stenness. But Orkney is, almost disconcertingly, full of ancient sites, and this one has a character all of its own.
The burial practice it commemorates has more recent examples elsewhere in the world. Bodies were laid out on the rocks for eagles to strip the flesh, after which the bones were interred in the mound. Access to the chamber involves lowering ourselves through a narrow tunnel in manner uncomfortably close to an MRI scan, though thankfully, the tunnel is considerably shorter and does not emit alarming noises. The mound itself is small but amazing, a genuine connection across five thousand years of human time.
The surrounding coastline is composed of flagstone sedimentary rock, stacked and fractured into dramatic shapes, with thousands of seabirds nesting in the ledges.
Close by, a further Mesolithic site known as a Burnt Mound, a place where stones were heated to red heat and plunged into water-filled tanks. What for, precisely, remains a matter of some debate…tannery, sauna, communal bathing, large-scale cooking. What strikes us more forcefully, standing there in the wind, is simply the act of touching stones handled daily by ordinary people going about the ordinary business of their lives, four or five thousand years ago. There is something in that which no interpretation board quite captures.
The visitor centre and site are now run by the community, combining paid staff and volunteers in a model that appears to work with real efficiency and pride. It is a reminder that the Orcadian way of doing things, local and collaborative is not merely a romantic notion. It is a practical reality.
We say farewell to Alan with real warmth and a great deal of new local knowledge, and sail back to Stromness on a wind that has, surprisingly helpfully, swung precisely 180 degrees and placed itself neatly behind us for the return. Scapa Flow again, glorious and unhurried.
Back in Stromness, we find ourselves, once again, quietly astonished by these islands.
A light late morning snooze after the trip across the Pentland Firth, sees us just about awake and bleary eyed at 2pm.
But the day is bright and sunny (for now…this is Orkney after all), and we head out to revisit some of the places we remember. It seems that not much has changed in the intervening nine years, in fact the place seems positively thriving. There are none of the mass of boarded up shops of Wick and far north Scotland, and people are out and about in the sun, or just sitting and chatting…
The nooks and crannies are brilliant and we spend a happy half hour in a wonderfully old-fashioned hardware and general store of the sort that Giles used to draw, everything from (almost) steamrollers to safety pins…
Nine years ago we spent a raucous evening in the Royal Hotel, watching a group from Shetland called Rack and Ruin. Sadly they are no more, but the Royal still has music on Saturday nights….this is a Monday unfortunately, so we content ourselves with a couple of local beers in the Ferry Inn….and a local gin…
…before heading back for dinner and some careful planning for the next few days.
Broadly, we had hoped to sail up to Westray, the most northerly of the Orkney islands. We ponder endlessly over weather forecasts and passages, but whatever way we cut things, we can get there OK, but its the getting back which presents a problem. There are some strong winds forecast for 3 days at the end of the week, and while we can sit them out in Pierowall on Westray, we wonder whether we would be better sitting out in the humming metropolis of Stromness.
OK OK….we know the real sailors out there, and even Joshua Slocum if the old boy was still alive, would be shaking their heads sadly, and muttering about snowflakes afraid of a bit of rough. However, an 8 hour beat into a F6, with the real possibility of missing a safe tidal gate between Hoy and Orkney mainland, is not appealing if we don’t have to submit ourselves to it.
Back and forth goes our thinking, the clarity of which is not helped by general sleepiness. The best decision….some sightseeing tomorrow based on gin and whisky in Kirkwall, and then see what the weather chooses to throw in our direction.
Tuesday, no alarms, bliss…just a morning cuppa in bed and a gradual coming to…
Orkney has a brilliant public transport network where busses actually integrate with each other and the many ferries which ply between the islands. We catch the bus to Kirkwall, but despite being self-evidently old, we don’t pass as Scottish so don’t get a discount off the huge £2 fare!
Before heading too indecently quickly to the distillery, we grab breakfast in what used to be the very grand old townhall…
St Magnus cathedral has a real charm, and the inscriptions of the dead, and even a tapestry presented recently by the King of Norway, all point to the very nordic past and continuing cultural links and ties.
Finally….we can decently head to the Orkney distillery.
A couple of gin flights does the trick, and the rest of the morning passes…
We had intended to trundle out to Scapa distillery, but noticed that the Orkney also does whisky flights where we can compare not just the two main ones, Highland Park and Scapa, but also their own blends, as they have a new single malt ready in the next year or so. It would be rude not to…
Food is needed before more spirit, so we haul ourselves a good 100m to a Japanese street food kitchen for some Teriyaki…and then back for the whisky.
Nine years ago we met Alan and his friend Ian in Wick and because they had some concerns about the engine in their sailing boat, we agreed to accompany them across the Pentland Firth to their homes in South Ronaldsay. We have kept almost in touch via Christmas cards, and hoped to catch up. As luck would have it, we managed to make contact with Alan and hope to see him where he now lives on Burray.
This has given us some more food for thought….we can easily sail to Burray and back before the weather closes in, and we will then be in Stromness ready for a two day window to leave Orkney and get back to the west coast of Scotland.
Back in Stromness we see this…
Great at one level, but a quick snog behind the multi modal, low carbon and active travel hub will never catch on…
…and the day leaves us with yet another rapid weather change, and a lovely photo…
Orkney has not disappointed. It is every bit as charming, lively and quirky as before.
Revisiting places full of happy memories can sometimes be a bit of a fool’s errand. The food will be worse, the weather will be worse, and we will be older. Nevertheless, here we are in Stromness, nine years on, and we are delighted to report that the pessimists are, on this occasion, entirely wrong.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Two consecutive pre-dawn starts had left us in a condition politely described as knackered. Wick offered the prospect of rest and recuperation, and we embraced it wholeheartedly, until we discovered that Sunday public transport in this corner of Scotland amounts to one train and a rail replacement bus, both timed specifically to be of no use whatsoever. Old Pulteney distillery, which might otherwise have provided a perfectly reasonable programme for the day, was shut. Clearly, some activity was going to be required.
We compromised. We took a taxi.
Castle Sinclair Girnigoe turned out to be entirely worth the journey. Perched on sheer cliffs in a manner that would have any modern planning department reaching in fits, it is both magnificent and deeply alarming. Its history is, if anything, even more dramatic than its location. One clan chief, apparently not bothered by the norms of fatherhood, imprisoned his own son within its walls and sustained him exclusively on salt beef until the poor man died of thirst. We don’t think he would have done well in the current era of parenting.
Cromwell passed through briefly, and thereafter the castle got on with the business of falling into ruin.
The coast here is very craggy and we understand why you would build a castle here if you distrust some of the locals, even if it seems completely precarious…
The Noss Head lighthouse nearby has acquired a coffee caravan, which was doing brisk business. The baked goods on offer were extensive, and we concluded that the walk back to Wick would require more calories than strictly needed for nutrition. The cliff-top path being very boggy, we took the road instead, which proved longer but considerably drier, and passed through countryside that once formed part of the Coastal Command network, intercepting signals from German ships and occupied Norway and sending them south to Bletchley for decryption.
Back aboard Heydays, we turned our attention to Orkney. The weather forecast, as is normal round here, is everchanging making life or passages hard to plan. We wanted to reach some of the smaller islands missed on the previous visit, but after some debate, we settled on Stromness as the obvious first port of call, well-placed, well-sheltered, and an entirely acceptable place to be pinned down by the weather for several days should that prove necessary. Up here, this is what is known as a plan.
The Pentland Firth demanded its usual degree of respect. The tidal streams through here are not merely strong, they are the stuff that features in accident reports. The standing waves known as the Merry Men of Mey are named, one can only assume, by someone with a very odd sense of humour, as there is nothing remotely merry about them. Vessels considerably larger and more robust than Heydays have come to grief in them. The pilotage is precise, two miles east of Duncansby Head, one hour and fifteen minutes after high water Dover, at the exact moment of slack water as the tide turns north-west. We needed to be there at 0615. Wick is two and a half hours away under engine. The arithmetic is straightforward and deeply unwelcome: alarm at 0245, slip mooring at 0330.
The one concession the far north makes at this time of year is that darkness barely registers. We went to bed at eight o’clock in broad daylight, which is a peculiar experience, and lay there with the rain doing its best to keep us awake.
Sleep came, eventually, but was not entirely restful…
At 0245, the alarm achieved what rain, daylight, and general anxiety had failed to do and woke us up. We got ourselves into full wet weather gear and sufficient warm layers to stifle all mobility, and by 0330 were sliding quietly away from the mooring with enough light to steer by…
We have the lights of Noss Head and then Duncansby Head to guide us, and we slide past the now ghostly Castle Sinclair Girnigoe.
The only other signs of life at this god-forsaken hour are the ever present, very cute, but incredibly shy guillemots. They resolutely refuse to be photographed and swim away underwater with a technique that looks just like flying.
The rain eases, but the temperature stays firmly well in single figures as the headlands pass in silhouette. Hot coffee helps…
With absolutely no wind at all we use “the old iron tops’l”, as old sailors probably never said, and we get to the start of the Pentland Race exactly at slack water and to the minute of the pilot guide….smug or what…
As Duncansby Head and the iske of Stroma fall astern, and Muckle Skerry with its very lonely light slides past to starboard…
…we fix our eyes on South Ronaldsay and Swona. The westerly stream is now doing its best to suck us towards the race, and we are steering around 40 degrees east just to make good our course.
Gradually we draw a beam of Swona, and, now protected by South Ronaldsay, we are through the worst and still with no wind, motoring freely towards Scapa Flow.
We see it coming….a squall from dead ahead bringing winds on the nose, heavy rain, and very little visibility. Our plan is to head up Hoxa Sound and then across Scapa Flow, but a message on the radio adds to our joy as it warns of a big tanker leaving to transit down the Sound in the opposite direction.
We decide to use discretion (much underrated) and instead plot a passage to shimmy between the island of Hoy and the small islands of Switha, Flotta and Cava.
As the visibility improves slightly, we catch a glimpse of the tanker, thankfully to be nowhere near…
The change of course turns out to be delightful, as the weather changes as rapidly as it came, and we find ourselves in bright sun (albeit with wind on the nose….obviously).
The last few miles past Graemsay and in to Stromness are brilliant and there is a real sense of almost a homecoming.
The ferry runs in ahead of us …
and by the time we have tied up ourselves, it is already loading for the return trip.
We feel like we’ve done a day’s work already…it’s only 10.45am, but fried eggs and more coffee make up ….what? Breakfast? Brunch?…..before a really welcome snooze. It’s great to be back.
Even after one day, the early morning routine is established….get dressed by numbers, say a bleary good morning as brightly as we can to each other and get the kettle on. The forecast is for showers, a bit of a chill and Easterly F4….more getting togged up and more layers. Just as we are getting ready to slip the mooring, Billy and his son arrive back in harbour and they are really chipper having had a good haul of langoustines. We thank him for the crab, but as we leave the harbour he throws us a big bag with at least 60 or 70 langoustine tails. What a brilliant way to start the day and so we slide out into the new day with not just hot coffee, but a really wonderful warm feeling and broad smiles on our faces.
The easterly F4 does not materialise…in fact there is not enough wind to properly fill the sails. However, the previous night’s easterly has left a rather short swell over the beam and Heydays rolls slightly uncomfortably. We tighten the sails, not to drive us along, but just to dampen the rolling.
The coast is definitely becoming craggier and there are all sorts of cliffs and stacks rising out of a sea with breakers at their foot.
Off shore there is a huge windfarm and we seem to be sailing past it for hours…alternately it is in bright sunshine and at other times we see the rain squalls washing past…some of which get us as well.
Amid all the slop and tossing of a beam swell, some dolphins decide to keep us company for a while. Not as spectacular as Coleraine last September, but they always lift the spirits…
As we approach Wick, there are signs of civilisation appearing on the cliffs, but no sign of the promised fresh easterlies…
We call the Wick Harbourmaster and he is waiting on the pontoon to guide us in and to take lines…another great welcome and service which we have rarely (if ever) met ‘down south.
We lunch on crab linguine, langoustines and a bottle of white…cheers again Billy from Helmsdale…and promptly fall asleep….
We do a short shopping list and head off to the Coop for essentials…2 whites, 2 reds, one gin, one tonic and some spaghetti….its a tough life.
Wandering round town, we get a sense of real decay since even the last time we were here in 2017. There are just so many shops which are boarded up and even the Weatherspoons has gone. It was clearly once a very grand town with huge wealth built on the herring. One information board describes the heyday of the herring industry with a single day catch of over 100million herring and an army of over 3000 fearsome herring gutter women. With over 1000 boats out of Wick in the 1930s we see just a couple of dozen now. The information board seemed to blame the quotas introduced in the 60s, but the reality is that the herring were simply over-fished, and they killed the very thing which made them rich.
However, as we wander back towards the harbour we see some signs for the future…huge wind turbine blades on the dockside ready for transportation to a new wind farm just down the coast. The blades are huge…78.5 meters long according to a young dock steward, and 20 tons, and are carried vertically on specially designed transporter. Great, we think. Maybe there is hope and life for the future, only to be told that these blades have come from Germany, while others come from Mexico and the US. We are left angry and frustrated. Why are we not building them here? Why are we not giving some hope, jobs and prosperity to a town which clearly needs it?
OK OK, this is a sailing blog, but one of the best bits about sailing like this is that we get to visit places which are convenient harbours, but which are off the tourist trail. We get to see bits of our country which we would not otherwise have visited and to confront some difficult truths about post industrial, finance and service sector focused UK.
heydays346 