Well, this is a genuine conundrum. Following the various dramas with trains and ignition switches, and a successful reunion with Yee Tak in Oban, our attention had turned to what we had planned as a gentle-ish cruise south, through the Crinan Canal, a nose around Arran, and on across to our winter berth in Coleraine. The weather, however, has other ideas, as it invariably does, and at the time of writing we remain holed up in Oban, looking for some combination of wind and current willing to carry us south and, ideally, a little west, towards Jura and Islay.

The wind, having sat up around Force 7 overnight and into this morning, has now backed round to the northwest, which would suit us handsomely, if still rather on the brisk side of comfortable. The trouble is that the wind god and the tide god have evidently fallen out. The wind is more or less agreeable; the tide is emphatically not. Both the Sound of Jura and the west side of the island run strong tidal streams, and wind-against-tide in those waters is the kind of combination that pilot books warn about in bold type, for good reason: a stiff northwesterly meeting a south-going stream can turn a perfectly civil stretch of water into something considerably steeper and less forgiving than the forecast alone would suggest.

The tide might turn favourable from around four this afternoon, but by the time it did we would be most unlikely to reach a decent anchorage or harbour before nightfall, and arriving after dark in unfamiliar waters thick with rocks is not an experiment we are keen to run, however confident the chartplotter looks about it. So, for the moment, the plan is to sit in the comfort of our own cockpit and watch other people attempting to moor without T-boning either their neighbours or the pontoon, the wind having come in rather stronger than advertised. There but for the grace of God, as the saying goes, and we say it with real feeling, having been on the receiving end of exactly that manoeuvre more than once ourselves.

The actual plan, such as it is, involves leaving at first light tomorrow to catch the first six hours of the tide, which, despite some light winds early on, should carry us well on our way towards Jura. Our difficulty after that is less easily solved: there appear to be remarkably few opportunities to make progress southwest towards Coleraine, with a fairly settled run of strong southwesterlies forecast for the next five or six days, which is precisely the direction we need to be going in and precisely the wind we would prefer not to be doing it into. More news, as they say, when there is any.

On a more cheerful note, the sail training square rigger in harbour today turned out to be Danish, and we spent a happy quarter of an hour watching some of her young crew going aloft, safely clipped on but still, by any reasonable measure, a bottom-clenching way to spend an afternoon. We watched from the comfortable and considerably lower vantage point of our own cockpit, and felt no particular urge to trade places.

One further small piece of trivia from a windy day in harbour: we finally retired the much-used, tattered, and thoroughly weather-beaten Scottish courtesy flag in favour of a new one. A belated show of respect from us Sassenachs, and rather overdue.