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.

A change of plan, and the Uists

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.