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…
An apology first to the loyal reader. These posts have all landed today, the 20th, the moment we found halfway decent wifi, or indeed any wifi at all, and no loos or other pressing matters getting in the way.
Monday dawned bright over Canna and once again demanded an early start. We’d called ahead to the marina at Mallaig to check we could leave Heydays there for a few weeks, and were told to arrive before lunchtime if we wanted a pontoon berth for the day, useful for unloading. No matter, we’re well used to early starts by now, and there is something particular about that early morning light…
…the mist still lying in patterns over Rum and the Cuillins of Skye before the sun got round to burning it off, provided a stunning and everchinging backdrop to our last day on the water…
The wind had all but given up, so the old girl went back to being a motor boat for the four hours or so to journey’s end, for now. A small pod of what looked like juvenile dolphins crossed our bow, but breakfast held rather more appeal for them than we did, and they carried on about their business. Rounding the Point of Sleat at the southern tip of Skye, a minke whale put in a brief appearance, ambling northward, evidently already fed and entirely unhurried, beautiful and faintly magical even for the few seconds we had it.
Mallaig is busy with ferries and small workboats busying themselves, let alone the fishing boats and tourist sightseeing trips…
A radio call for permission to enter, and by elevenses we were moored and beginning to unwind before the business of tidying and packing took over.
Mallaig is well served with restaurants, and we tracked down a bowl of Cullen Skink without much difficulty. The waitress advised us to be seated before 12.30, as that’s when the steam train comes in. We took the interval to hunt down soil pipe for the heads, and came away with the last 7.5 metres in the shop. At 12.30 we were the only souls in the restaurant, complete with an incongruous coil of pipe under the table. By 12.31 it was full, with a queue out the door. It turns out the train’s fame rests on its run across the Glenfinnan Viaduct into Mallaig, as any of the thousands of visiting Harry Potter enthusiasts could have told us. The town, we now realise, runs to a respectable trade in witch, wizard, and broomstick paraphernalia.
Some final notes and thoughts. The end came rather more rushed than planned, but we count ourselves fortunate to have cruised the Hebrides and Canna at all. The enforced stops in Stornoway and Tarbert, forced on us by weather rather than choice, gave us the chance to get properly into Lewis and Harris in a way we’d never have managed moving on every day or two. Tomorrow, two of us head up to Ullapool to collect the car, while the boat is readied for the thirteen hour drive back to Hampshire and Dorset. As the crow flies, Mallaig to Ullapool is nothing much, by car it’s three and a half hours, and the fastest public transport option has you leaving Mallaig at 8am and arriving at 16.30. The lochs are beautiful, but a considerable nuisance if you’re not travelling by water.
We’ll be back in early to mid September, before the equinoctial gales if we’ve timed it right, to cruise south via Oban and the islands to our winter berth, once again in Coleraine.
A final, final footnote. A Moody a couple of feet shorter than Heydays came in and moored a little further up the pontoon. Some time later, a knock on the cabin. Word had evidently got round about our toilet troubles, the coil of pipe rather gave the game away, and it turned out they had exactly the same problem. We traded plumbing anecdotes and remedies over the guardrail, and having bought up the last of the pipe for miles in any direction, handed over what we could spare, keeping back only what we urgently needed ourselves. Somewhere up the pontoon, there is now another fully functioning Moody heads.
The plan was lunch on Canna, then onward to Rum or Eigg for the night. An early start to catch the best of the tide had us through the usual boat and human morning rituals…and ended with a firmly blocked toilet. We’d only just replaced the valves, so those were the first suspects; a thorough investigation cleared them of all suspicion, which was not the outcome we were hoping for.
We looked at each other. Two days’ sail and a night at anchor or a mooring buoy ahead. Could we manage on the old bucket and chuck it system? The female contingent on board received this suggestion with something considerably short of enthusiasm, which meant we needed to get to the actual bottom of the problem. Pun very much intended.
Without dwelling on the gorier details, this involved extracting two metres of soil pipe from the bowels of the boat and attempting to clear it dockside. We were grateful that Sunday morning finds most sensible Barra residents still firmly in bed, and thus spared the spectacle. Suffice to say, a deep shower was required afterwards, our clothes went straight into a sealed bag, and it’s now clear the full run of pipework will need replacing at the next opportunity. For the moment, though, we have a fully functioning heads, which counts as a considerable win.
…sailing is all about the glamour…apparently…
By around noon we finally slipped back out into the bay, bound for Canna. We were fighting the tide the whole way, exactly the wrong side of it for this leg, but Canna is the right jumping off point for Mallaig tomorrow, so it had to be endured. The wind, at least, was in a more generous mood, a south easterly giving us a glorious beam reach almost the whole way across, making up for what the tide was taking off us.
A few dolphins passed by en route, entirely uninterested in ourcompany, and were gone before anyone found a camera. A solitary tern made a half-hearted attempt at the masthead, and the usual scattered rafts of guillemots dived nervously out of our path as we came through.
Canna slipped in and out of the mist for a while, and behind us the Hebrides stood in fine silhouette before finally sinking below the horizon, our last sight of them for this stretch. Ahead, Rum and Canna loomed as the sky cleared,…
… and we readied Heydays to work her way into the little harbour… threading in with care before picking up a mooring buoy for the night.
Snug on the buoy, we headed ashore to the café, which was packed. We’d been to Canna nine years ago and still have the t-shirts to prove it. The little café is open on Sundays, a small miracle up here, and we talked our way into a 7.30 booking, just enough time to get in, get changed, inflate the tender, and putter ashore. Four of us turning up in nine year old t-shirts hardly amounts to loyal custom, but they seemed genuinely pleased we’d made the effort. We got talking to the waitress about life on the island, just twenty one permanent residents, she said, and around half of them young. She’d come out originally as a nanny, then met the love of her life, as the bump rather gave away, and simply stayed. It’s a good thing to see, not just a handful of old timers holding the fort, but real life still finding its way to these islands.
The middle-of-the-night alarm is one of those unwelcome but necessary disciplines of anchoring somewhere remote …up to check the transits still line up and that Heydays hasn’t decided to go for a wander of her own. As it turned out, our concern was entirely wasted…she sat rock solid all night, unmoved and unmoving, while we lost sleep on her behalf.
Morning brought glorious compensation, a loch entirely deserted but for us, lit up in early sunshine. There is something properly magical about that kind of isolation, not another soul in sight, and it seemed almost a small betrayal to be thinking about leaving. But time was pressing, and Barra, one of the southernmost islands of the Hebrides, was calling, so coffee was made in mugs, breakfast promised for underway, and Heydays readied for the day. We weighed anchor in the early light, hauling up a good quantity of South Uist mud in the process, almost certainly the only part of the island we will actually touch, which seems a shame.
Out of the loch and past an island of disgruntled cormorants, we turn south. The wind is kind enough to stay in the west and give us a fine sail past South Uist and Benbecula. Then, at last, Barra itself, and the business of finding the entrance to Castlebay, a channel with enough rocks scattered about it to concentrate the mind. The name, it turns out, is not merely decorative…there is indeed a castle sitting right in the middle of the bay. Kisimul Castle (we learn later!) is Norse in origin, the MacNeils’ seat for several centuries, and a reminder that these waters were Norwegian long before they were Scottish.
The marina is tiny, community-run, and home to only a couple of other visiting boats. We wandered up into the bustling metropolis of Castlebay itself…bustling being a relative term here…to discover we had missed lunch at the hotel by a single minute. Consolation arrived in the form of the Café Kisimul down by the harbour, which turned out to be rather better than the alternative anyway…excellent Indian-themed wraps, an oddly named beer, and a sunny spot outside in one of the loveliest villages at the tip of the Hebrides. We had assumed, reasonably enough, that the café’s name was a nod to its Indian menu. We were entirely wrong — it is named, of course, for the castle in the bay.
An all too brief wander around the little town and we have a feel for life at this southerly end of the Hebrides…
We fell to musing, as one does in places like this, on how small remote communities are obliged to pull together in ways the mainland forgets. One final observation…where the northern isles remain firmly under the Scottish Church’s Sabbath…everything shut on a Sunday… Barra feels different, and not only in temperament. It is the Catholic Church that dominates the town physically here, and, remarkably, there are places open on a Sunday.
Thursday morning, and finally back on the water. We slipped the last of the mooring lines just after 0900 to catch the tail of the south-going tide through the southerly part of the Little Minch…no great feat of pilotage, but the sort of small discipline that saves an hour of frustration later. The forecast promised southwest force 3 to 5, backing west later, which was not entirely the wind we wanted but was at least not blowing us off the water…and with the added bonus of being able to see. Our enforced layovers in Stornoway and Tarbert have left us slightly behind our own schedule, so there was a mild, self-inflicted pressure to make distance. The plan, loosely held, was Loch Carnan on South Uist by evening, with Barra to follow on Saturday if all went well.
We eased out past the lock at Tarbert with the wind kindly on our stern, main up, expecting it to head us the moment we turned the corner south — which, with the reliable perversity of west coast winds, it duly did. A Norwegian-registered vessel lying in the loch turned out on inspection to be one of the work boats that service the salmon farms: a floating factory whose job is to bathe farmed fish in fresh water to strip off the sea lice that thrive in close-packed cages. We are not yet prepared to renounce salmon entirely, but the image of listless, lice-ridden fish being freshened up before market does rather take the shine off a smoked salmon sandwich.
Visibility was moderate, good enough to see the mainland and Skye on the horizon, not good enough to call it anything better. We motor-sailed for a stretch with the wind stubbornly on the nose, the main earning its keep only nominally, in the manner familiar to anyone who has spent time matching a schedule against a west coast forecast. A purist might object that one should simply go where the wind allows, which today would have carried us pleasantly across to Skye a lovely island, but one we have visited before, whereas the Uists and Barra have not yet had the pleasure of our acquaintance, and it seemed a shame to let the wind make that decision for us.
A yacht under full sail put out from an anchorage to the south and, having assessed us under motor and main, making reasonable way. Apparently they decided that being a purist was overrated, or simply that they too wanted the miles, so they rolled away their genoa and settled onto much the same as our course, mainsail up, into the same obstinate southwesterly. We shared their impatience for the forecast’s promised backing to the west.
Traffic on the water was more varied than usual: the CalMac ferry pushing north on schedule, a couple of coasters, creel boats tending their lobster and crab pots, and a catamaran running north with the wind comfortably behind her — the easy option, and not remotely available to us.
Early afternoon brought the promised veer to the west, and Heydays finally settled into proper sailing, alternating between glorious weak sunshine and squalls that reduced visibility to something approaching nothing, the coastline appearing and disappearing in turn.
With a helpful tide now under us, we were making good progress, and about an hour short of Loch Carnan, our nominal destination, we decided the conditions merited pressing on. The chart showed an anchorage in Loch Eynort a couple of hours further south, which would leave us within five hours’ sailing of Barra and slightly ahead of ourselves for once.
South Uist, whose coast we were now working down, was not an island we knew anything much about before this trip, a gap in our education we made some effort to remedy over the course of the afternoon. It turns out to be famous, among other things, as the birthplace of Flora MacDonald, who in 1745 rowed Bonnie Prince Charlie away from these shores disguised as her Irish maid, Betty Burke, a story we vaguely recognised from school history, and a very incomplete set of lyrics to ‘speed bonnie boat…’ without ever quite placing it here. It is a slightly improbable thing to learn while sailing past the very coastline in question…
We found Loch Eynort entirely empty of other boats, and set about identifying the best shelter from the westerly still blowing down its length. The shoreline here shelves quickly and is thoroughly unforgiving of complacency; our preferred anchoring depth of around 10 metres brought us in closer to the rocks than we would normally choose, and the alternative, anchoring in deeper water with a length of warp bent onto the chain, we set aside in favour of a first attempt on chain alone, motoring around the loch to assess the holding before committing.
In 10 metres we let go the anchor and watched Heydays settle back onto her chain until it came bar taut, always the reassuring moment, the point at which a length of galvanised steel chain either proves its worth or doesn’t. We had veered enough chain to allow for a further two metres of tidal rise, putting us at a scope of something over four to one, comfortably beyond the minimum and enough to sleep on without excessive vigilance. We checked the chart again for the state of the rocks at low water, satisfied ourselves that we had room to swing, and settled in for an evening with no other sign of human presence anywhere in view, not even, remarkably for these parts, a sheep.
There is a particular joy to anchoring somewhere entirely alone. It is not that we object to company; simply that such places are increasingly rare in our crowded corner of the world, and worth noting when they present themselves. We set anchor alarms nonetheless, and woke a couple of times through the night to check that all remained as we had left it, a small price on an otherwise undisturbed peace.
It is an ill wind, they say, which has kept us in harbour a further day. After a lazy start, we made the best of it with a walk up to a small headland above the loch and Heydays, from where the views were stunning. We passed a scatter of houses which the harbourmaster assured us were probably still crofts in the old sense, smallholdings rather than museum pieces, still worked in whatever hours their owners can spare from the rest of life.
Against the general greyness of the day, the heather, lichen, seaweed, and even some old boats, took on an amazing vividness, each competing for the most inspiring colour in a Hebridean palette that otherwise runs to fifty shades of granite…
Two hours of walking left us feeling pleased with ourselves in the particular way that only mildly strenuous exercise in bad weather can produce. Back on board we occupied ourselves with the small maintenance tasks that expand to fill the time available, then sat down to an early dinner of pies and fishcakes from the local deli, preceded by what seemed at the time a excellent idea, namely mojitos, and undone by the discovery that the Bacardi had reduced itself to a single, unhelpful dribble. A dash to the shop before closing followed. Some things are not negotiable, and pre-dinner cocktails are among them.
The evening brought the promise of live music at the pub, which proved sufficient cause for Chris and Yee Tak to abandon sailing togs in favour of something resembling respectability. The guitarist, backed by the sort of electronic box that has replaced entire rhythm sections in small venues the world over, worked his way through the usual soft-rock repertoire, but came alive properly when he turned to folk material and a couple of songs in Gaelic. We rather wished he’d done more of the latter, though the room, mostly holidaymakers like ourselves, responded more readily to the covers. Gaelic speakers were evidently thin on the ground that night…
We wake to one of the thickest fogs and a ferry looming out still gloomy, even though only meters away…
We’re also fascinated by a remote controlled survey vessel which has been surveying the sea bed beteween here and Skye in order to find a route for a new electricity supply cable. Slightly spooky in the fog, made even more so by the all too frequent news of the work of unmanned drones in warfare…
Today is the day we pay attention to the old girl’s bottom and we tie up by the harbour wall with the ever helfull Kiki the harbourmaster and his partner Kim on hand to take lines …and chat. There follows a waiting game while she dries out.
This corner of Harris is very nearly its own island — a ten-minute walk across the isthmus gets you to the little harbour on the Atlantic side…just the odd cormorant who we manage to annoy…
With the tide out and the old girl’s bottom exposed, we got to work with the pressure washer. Coppercoat has served us well, though as suspected we’d picked up a bit of weedy fouling in Ullapool — antifouling protection, we’re learning, varies enormously around these shores. A few scuff marks later, she was looking respectable again, and a bowl of Cullen Skink in the hotel was calling — thick, creamy, and thoroughly committed to fish.
We stayed through the afternoon waiting for the water to return, a wait made considerably more bearable by a scone and a cream tea. By early evening we had water under the keel again and headed back to the berth in a gathering drizzle.
Footnote: today was also the day of the eclipse. Thick cloud and thicker drizzle meant we could only read about the wondrous scenes back home as the moon briefly took charge of the sun. Undeterred, as the evening slid from merely gloomy to very gloomy indeed, we put the eclipse specs on anyway.
The plan was a day in Tarbert before pressing south to the Uists, but the weather up here rarely reads the plan. Thursday was forecast to bring something strongish from an unhelpful quarter, which left us with the usual menu of options: motor into wind and sea (uncomfortable), beat into it (uncomfortable-ish, and longer, with three hours of foul tide thrown in as a parting gift), or simply not go. We were still weighing this up when we noticed a perfectly good gravelly beach sitting right beside the harbour wall.
A word with Kiki, the incredibly cheerful and helpful Harbourmaster, secured us the loan of his pressure washer. We’d noticed Heydays losing a little speed through the water lately, so the decision rather made itself: we would stay, and beach her on Wednesday.
The same conversation with Kiki revealed he also keeps a few lobster pots. Not free this time (he resisted Yee Tak’s charms) but a couple of fresh lobsters later, dinner was sorted.
The village also runs to a surprisingly good deli and grocery selection, which came in handy for Chris, whose enthusiasm for seafood is, let’s say, measured, and who was glad of some non-lobster options for her own dinner.
The distillery is young by whisky standards but observes proper Hebridean-summer form regardless, with a fire going and sofas comfortable enough to threaten the rest of the afternoon. A couple of tasting flights and a glass of their own Harris gin duly saw off what remained of it. Just the lobsters left to deal with.
Harris Tweed remains firmly in demand, even as the ranks of local weavers thin. The colours are extraordinary, and we did briefly entertain re-upholstering Heydays in it — a thought that survived approximately as long as it took to hear the price of £55 a metre.
Dinner on board was a genuine 4 way collaboration with lobsters cooked and cracked, a cheesy veggie bake and a couple of fish cakes all preceded by some gin and washed down with the odd glass of wine…
The strong winds and squally showers of the last few days are gone and we are looking forward to a few days of lighter winds and maybe even something rain free.
The 6am alarm is its usual unwelcome arrival, but routine kicks in and the boat comes to life…warps and ropes made ready for departure, water topped up, sail covers unzipped…and the first coffee of the morning ready in mugs.
By 7am we have confirmed with the harbour authority that the ferry is clear and we can slide away from Stornoway into what is still a gloomy sky. The seal hanging around by the fishing boat shows us no regard at all, mostly on account of the fact that we have no handy fish guts to toss overboard…
With such a rocky landscape, we are able to hug the coast….none of the wariness associated with the off lying sandbanks and shoals of our home waters…just a few rocks to contend with. Fortunately these mostly don’t move (at least not in our human timescale), and we can pass mostly within the proverbial biscuit toss.
With a full main and genoa in light airs and a calm sea, we trundle on down the east coast of Lewis, accompanied by a small coaster making its way down the Minch, a couple of disinterested dolphins, the usual guillemots, and a cheeky tern which sits for a while on our mast, defying the others with some seemingly furious cries. The rocky coast slides past with its Lewis Gneiss, waterfalls and occasional light…and Skye looming in the background….
Off the light house at Gob Na Miolaid we start to turn a bit more west and into the wind, which has now dropped to a barest puff. Needing to get past the Shiant Islands before the tide turns, we furl the genoa and turn our boat once more into a diesel hybrid.
The sea becomes ever more glassy and as we round Scalpay, the sun greets us over Tarbert (not to be confused with Tarbert on the mainland!).
Calmac leaves and the harbourmaster is waiting to greet us on the pontoon….what service. The little harbour here has been recently renovated, but we have our choice of places…none of the mad late afternoon scramble often encountered in the Solent…..
Ashore, we are too late for the distillery which is handily placed right at the end of the pontoon…oh well….we’ll just have to stay another night…
Footnote: Three flags at the end of the pontoon…EU, Greenland and Canada…what could they possibl;y have in common we wonder, apart from possibly, the subject of the ire of a certain North American President!!
Last year, in Arklow, we fell into conversation with a couple on a boat called Restless (Ann and Tim) on the strength of restless having “Stornoway” painted on her transom. Since we had hopes of getting here ourselves one day, this seemed sufficient grounds for a chat. It transpired she was actually from Oban, and it was they who first pointed us towards Peter May, a local author responsible for a trilogy of detective thrillers set up predominantly in Lewis and Harris. We have all now read them, and are agreed that they are really pretty good. A visit to the tourist information office gave us a leaflet and map identifying the key locations, and we have been treating the island as a literary I spy ever since.
We should note for the sake of accuracy, that the weather has been grim since our arrival and shows no sign of improving before Monday. As this is being written the wind is getting through the rigging at an alarming rate, comfortably over 25 knots, with a noise best described as something out of a cheap horror movie. Monday looks more promising, so in the meantime we have hired a small car for a couple of days of land-based sightseeing, weather having made the sea-based variety unadvisable.
The castle, it turns out, is a relative newcomer as these things go, nineteenth century, and for all its grandeur carries a history one would not choose to have inscribed on a family crest. One James Matheson made his fortune selling opium to the Chinese, a detail of particular interest to Yee Tak given the wider history of Hong Kong, and used the proceeds to buy up a dilapidated castle, which he then rebuilt entirely, having first cleared the local crofters and demolished a village that had the temerity to interrupt his view. A most public-spirited gentleman.
The attached museum, happily, redeems the visit, compact enough not to feel like a forced march, and full of genuinely good material on Hebridean life. A lovely lady there took us thoroughly under her wing, and was so taken with the subject of Alyth McCormack’s wedding that, well past closing time, she was still pulling photographs from drawers to talk us through a dress woven in fine white Harris Tweed. (Alyth McCormack is a noted local Gaelic singer, long associated with The Chieftains.)
From there we repaired to McNeill’s Bar, another haunt of Fin Macleod, Peter May’s detective, we are trying hard not to turn into some sort of Hebridean version of I-Spy, with limited success. It is a proper old-fashioned boozer, refreshingly unburdened by gastro-pub pretensions or artisanal olive oil.
The night delivered pounding rain and rigging-whistling wind in equal measure, neither showing the slightest inclination to ease off by dawn. We heard that a cruise ship, due in, had abandoned the attempt and pressed on to Iceland instead, apparently they could have got in well enough, but the forecast made getting back out again look unwise.
We started our little car tour by visiting the site of a disastrous shipwreck just ouside Stornaway. The Iolaire was carrying navy reservists home for leave when, with an inexperienced skipper and crew, she struck the rocks which we hasd passed just a day earlier. The sites of these tragedies are always quite emotional to visit, but this was made all the more poignant by the fact that we visited in a near gale and could understand the horror of men losing their lives just a few meters from the shore…
It became apparent to us, speaking to some local folk, that this is still a raw and needless tragedy which touched most families on Lewis…
Our little car excursion then took us through the geography of the novels proper: the house Fin grew up in, his aunt’s house, the site of the fictional body’s discovery, the church and the manse, all real, all rather wonderful to stand in front of. Despite the driving rain and gale-force wind, or perhaps somewhat because of them, we felt we were beginning to understand these remote and occasionally inhospitable islands — and perhaps even to glimpse why they might incline towards a dour and faintly vengeful strain of Christianity.
The little harbour at the very northern tip of Lewis, Point of Ness, seems impossibly tight and narrow to even think of entering in calm weather, let alone in the 140 out of 360 days when a gale blows…
The island tradition was of ‘Black Houses’…simple stone cottages with double thick walls and rooves of thatch held in place by netting and they feature heavily in the novels. The accommodation was often shared with the animals and a peat fire was lit right in the middle of the main living area. The village here, was inhabited until the early 70s when the last inhabitants were moved into modern council houses…
Peat is still very much in use as an everyday fuel…
The black houses were gradually replaced in the early 20th century by the ‘white houses’…
We ended up back at McNeill’s, where a local musician was giving the assembled company precisely what it wanted — everything from the Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond to the Proclaimers’ 500 Miles — sung with tremendous enthusiasm by band and early-evening drinkers alike, the latter well on their way to becoming the genuine article.
Tesco have only recently been allowed to open on a Sunday (noon to 8pm to enable the locals to go to church), for the rest of Lewis and Harris (the ‘protestant’ islands) nothing is open…
Without even a hot coffee on offer, we pack a lunch and set out for the beaches of the very rugged West Coast. The drive is stunning and the landscape is rugged…and there is the inevitable norse chessman…
…and the beaches are incredible, tempting the hardier members of the crew in for a brief dip…
The weather is set fair for us to press on tomorrow, which will mean a reasonably early start, but for now, back aboard Heydays, we find ourselves musing on this corner of the Hebrides, and drawing, inevitably, comparisons with Orkney. This is, to our admittedly first impressions, a markedly less prosperous society, and one in which the rather austere Church of Scotland continues to exercise real influence. Sunday here is still observed as the Sabbath, and external entertainment is neither permitted nor, in practice, available. The towns lack something of the vibrancy and gaiety we found further north, though the scenery more than compensates. We find we can manage perfectly well without shops or pubs on a Sunday; it rather forces one into simply inhabiting the present, and being part of a place quite different from the frantic, consumption-driven south we normally call home.
It is also, we have noticed, a place that attracts a rather higher calibre of adventurous sailor than we are used to, a marked departure from the “only leave the marina on a fine day” school of seamanship more commonly encountered in Lymington. There was the New Zealand couple on their steel Van der Staadt, Dutch-built, currently planning a passage to Norway before crossing the Atlantic (for the third time) en route home. There was the Dutch singlehander who had just come in from the Faroes, two days of it thoroughly rough. And there was Restless, mentioned above, who completed their second Atlantic crossing only last year. These islands, it is fair to say, are not simply just another part of the country.
Footnote: A large French boat arrived in harbour this evening, with what appeared to be a very odd black and white flag flying. We then realise that this ‘flag’ was in fact a very large (and presumably very expensive) genoa split from tack to clew (side to side|). After a big struggle they finally got it under control and dropped on deck…this is a sober reminder that these waters can catch even the cautious and well prepared…
Here we are, then, at Stornoway, on the Outer Hebrides — arrived at last, and at the third attempt. The first was nine years ago, on our original circumnavigation, when we simply ran out of time. The second came in May, when, having reached Tobermory on Mull, we found several days of unrelenting headwinds ranged against us, and elected instead to go where the wind actually wanted us to go, which turned out to be up the canal to Inverness. However, we are ahead of ourselves…
Today turned out to be a weather window not to be missed. Strong winds on Wednesday, and more forecast for Friday, left a narrow gap through which to scuttle across The Minch. Sailing, as we’ve said before, is a business of a hundred small decisions, go or stay, is the wind kind or merely tolerable, too strong or too weak, will the tide still be OK when we arrive? Today offered its usual quota of these. Stornoway lies roughly north-west of Ullapool, and the wind for the first four hours was rather unhelpfully, coming from precisely that direction. A shift to the south-west was promised later, which would suit us perfectly, though quite when “later” might arrive was anyone’s guess. So do we motor on the direct line, or tack laboriously upwind for six hours and see what turned up?
We decided to go. With the cupboards rammed, the diesel tank nearly full and the water topped up, we slipped from the pontoon into the early morning light over the loch, the sky a noncommittal mix of cloud and blue that gave nothing away about what the passage west might hold.
It being early August, we were dressed in our summer finest…summer, that is, by Scottish reckoning, which less shorts and more thermals…
As we eased out, there was little sign of life aboard the elegant tall ship Flying Dutchman, nor on the fishing boats still tied up at the quay, and Ullapool looked lovely in the early light as we motored gently away, promising ourselves, as one does, that we’d be back.
The loch’s exit is guarded by a scatter of rocky outcrops and islands, past stern-faced cliffs that seem set there for the purpose, and with a swell running from the north and the wind stubbornly on the nose, we simply motored on, trusting that the promised sou’wester would arrive sooner rather than later.
For company we had, for a while, a single small fishing boat, and little else, as we chugged steadily westward.
A passage of eight or nine hours soon settles into its own rhythm: coffee at reasonably regular intervals, the odd biscuit, a nap here and there, and (old habits persisting) the log kept up hourly and the position dutifully plotted on paper charts, which we still favour. There remains something quietly satisfying about reaching the next fold in the chart. With a lumpy sea running, lunch was soup, from mugs rather than any tureen, silver service being conspicuously absent, and chunks of bread, and still the rain held off, for all the darkening cloud now gathering over what was unmistakably Lewis and Harris. Somebody’s god, evidently, was smiling on us.
When the wind shift finally came, it came quickly, and Heydays was soon scudding along on a glorious beam reach, full main and genoa drawing beautifully through a rainless, occasionally sunlit afternoon. The wind built steadily over the next hour, sending us back on deck to put a couple of reefs in the main and roll away some genoa. It also brought with it the short, confused chop of wind against tide, and although Heydays is a dry boat as boats go, we still shipped the odd lump of green water over the side for our trouble.
This was sailing at its best, and all too soon we were thirty minutes out from Stornoway and thinking about sails down and the business of entering harbour. We were asked, along with a fishing vessel also waiting its turn, to hold station while a vast cruise ship negotiated what for it was a decidedly narrow entrance. We idled about, occupying ourselves with ropes and fenders and the general choreography of arrival, and were rather amused to hear the harbourmaster politely informing the cruise ship that he had a yacht and a fishing boat waiting, and would it kindly get on with it. It steamed past in due course, trailing a cloud of exhaust,
and we came in behind it, past the imposing bulk of Lews (correct spelling!) Castle,
…and a couple of seals waiting patiently next to a fishing boat…
…to our first landing in the Hebrides.
The weather is closing in for the next 3 days and so we will do some general touristy bits, but for us…this felt like an adventure. Not the stuff of oceans, but a sense of achievement at bringing the old girl to one of the more remote parts of the country…
heydays346 