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!!
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…
July has been spent “down south,” as they probably don’t say here in Ullapool, re-acquainting ourselves with friends, family, grandchildren, and the various small trials that come with each.
The south of England, meanwhile, treated us to its third proper heatwave of the summer, temperatures loitering in the low thirties and sleep reduced to a nightly fight over which side of the pillow might, briefly, pretend to be cool. Be careful what you wish for, as someone once said.
Tuesday the 4th duly arrived, waking us bleary in the near-dark for the thirteen-hour haul north via Milford on Sea. We had, of course, been watching the forecasts, and knew perfectly well that the north-west of Scotland had not been sharing in the south’s toasting. What we hadn’t quite bargained for was the precision of it: roughly a degree lost for every hundred miles, so that by the border we were down to sixteen and hunting for a jumper. The waterproofs came out not long after. The landscape, it must be said, was doing rather better than Dorset’s uniform brown, lush and green in a way that had an obvious explanation, which duly arrived in the form of driving rain and wipers struggling to keep pace. This, apparently, is what we had wished for.
By Ullapool the deluge had eased to something merely damp, and after a few unsuccessful circuits in search of anywhere still serving food, we settled for the Essence of India, unprepossessing from the outside but generous with both flavour and value, and a great welcome home.
The harbourmaster ran us out to Heydays through the gathering gloom, and we were soon aboard, unpacking in a very cursory way at the end of a long day, fortified by a couple of nips of rum. Sleep came quickly after that, with no fan whirring in pursuit of nonexistent cool air, and, for once, no need to sleep on top of the covers rather than under them.
Heydays had been on a mooring in the loch for the last few weeks, but we decided for convenience to bring her into a pontoon for a day. Despite a rather grey morning, it was great just to get water flowing past her keels again, even if it was just for a few hundred metres and in the company of the morning ferry from Stornaway…
The day’s plan is the usual mix: an aging old girl requiring her now-customary quota of small repairs and general fussing to keep her in fine form, and a Tesco run for the essentials, namely coffee, wine, bread, milk, eggs, and wine.
With rain forecast we set off with the loose intention of shopping first and finding lunch second, though a hint of sunshine rearranged our priorities, and noon found us at The Seafood Shack, a real favourite from last time. It has the considerable advantage of a gin bar next door, which by five past twelve was already close enough to the first drink of the evening.
A thoroughly glorious place, made more so by harbour staff kind enough to let us park the car for a few weeks in what I gather is the harbourmaster’s mother’s own space.
Ullapool is a funny mix of the charm of a fishing village, complete with local gig rowers….
…and of course a small marina for the likes of us…
…set against the major ferry terminal serving the Outer Hebrides, providing a stark juxtaposition of the old dutch topsail schooner, against the rather less than environmentally friendly modern ferry…
With the rain still politely holding off, we managed a feeble gesture towards exercise, a stroll along the loch to watch the CalMac arrive in from Stornoway with a small fishing boat trailing dutifully behind.
We rounded the day off with a trip back to the pop-up gin bar and seafood shack and some very local music. Its funny how live music in context becomes entrancing, even if it is not something we would naturally be drawn to …
Tomorrow we follow the CalMac ferry back the way it came, wind permitting, with plans to take our time down through Lewis, Harris, the Uists, and Barra, before swinging back to Oban via the small isles, Canna, Rum, Eigg and the rest. That, at least, is the plan…this part of the world has a habit of making fools of the best laid plans.
Footnote: We hope not to follow the ferry in any literal sense…it reminded us of a very early trip acxross the chanel from Poole to Cherbourg (possibly even our first). This was in the days before decent GPS and when radio direction finding was considered state of the art (OK…so we’re old!). The fog came down, we were uncertain of our position, and then a ferry loomed out of the gloom and we followed it, hoping that it was the Cherbourg ferry and not the one bound for St Malo! It did go to Cherbourg, we did get there in one piece and we never fully trusted RDF again!
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.
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.
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…
…just a fishing boat rounding the head towards Scrabster…
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.
We are back on Heydays having spent some time back home, renewing our acquaintances with grandchildren, gardens/allotments and general domestic stuff.
Chris is not with us for this leg so it’s just John, James and Yee Tak driving up to Inverness early on Tuesday morning. We take turns driving, 2 hours on and 2 hours off…a bit like being on watch for long sea passages. Breakfast in probably the best motorway services in the country, at Gloucester Farm Shop, and apart from a few pottystops and hand-overs, we get to Heydays by early evening and it’s great to be back on board…and she smells good too!
We have a couple of day’s worth of jobs planned…including new valves for the toilet…who says sailing is all glamour.
Friday morning and a 5.30am alarm gets us up if not raring. We were woken at times in the night as the rigging was whistling and vibrating in the wind, and the rain lashed down with a fierce drumming on the roof…not conditions conducive to a good sleep. The forecast is for westerly winds F4 to 6, but with showers for most of the day. The main reason for relinquishing our pillows so early, is so that we can get the strong ebb current out under the bridge and through the Channory Narrows. We get fully togged up as not only are we expecting rain, but the wind is chilly too.
We called Helmsdale Harbourmaster yesterday to check that there would be space for us, only to be told that due to a winter of South Easterly storms, the harbour and the entrance is silted up and that it is effectively closed to leisure boats. We explain that as a bilge keeler with limited draft, we are used to the south coast mud and are happy to take the ground. After a conversation with his boss, the very helpful Billy said that he was happy to take us and that if we call when we are close, he will guide us in.
It is brilliant to get the boat ready for the open sea…checking sails, ropes and finalising the navigation for the day.
Finally…we slip our mooring and slide out into the bright Inverness morning…
With the fresh breeze fine over the port quarter, we opt just for a genoa. Over the years we have found that the old girl sails really well like this, and is easy to tack down wind. The added note here is that we don’t need to push on too rapidly as we can’t enter Helmsdale until 2.30 at the earliest.
As Inverness falls astern into a brightening sky, we are grateful for our early morning coffee. This is June, but with lots of layers stuffing us up, it feels more like February.
We zig zag through the narrows and then we see them…our first dolphins of this leg. Sadly for us they are more interested in their own breakfast than playing or allowing their photo to be taken, but it is still lovely to see them…
We settle in to the usual pattern of a longish passage, the autohelm doing its job and us watching for the usual pot buoys. Of other ships we see nothing, just a small coaster pushing out eastwards.
The rain comes and goes and we are thankful for our wet weather gear, but when the sun deigns to make an appearance we are quite pathetically grateful…but it really lifts the spirits.
Lunch of hot soup and bread is a real treat…
…and soon we are contacting Billy the harbourmaster to guide us in across the new sandbanks. We line up the marks and then with a sharp turn into the harbour as instructed we are in and Billy is there to take our lines. 9 years ago we were the first yacht of the season to visit Helmsdale, this year we are also the first of the season to attempt the entrance. Just as we make fast our lines, the sky opens (again) and we retreat inside to dry off.
Billy has only been doing the job for a couple of months, as he used to be a regular fisherman. Now, with a couple of hip ops behind him, his son has the boat and Billy helps out from time to time, although he still has a small boat of his own which he uses occasionally. Mostly they catch crab, lobster and langoustines which they sell to local restaurants and hotels.
We opt for an afternoon nap and when we wake up, we find that Billy has left us a tub of crab meat. He is due to go out this evening with his son and so we say goodbye and just realise again how friendly and helpful the harbourmasters are up here.
Helmsdale has clearly seen better days, and the storms and silting of the harbour will do nothing to help. With a few forty winks under our eyelids, we head off for a wander round…
to the ‘famous’ La Mirage fish and chip restaurant. It is renowned for its huge portions, its glitzy pink décor and its famous attraction for Barbara Cartland who was apparently a frequent visitor. Under new owners the portions are less enormous, but we still can’t finish everything. We head back to Heydays considerably heavier than when we left and prepare ourselves for another early tide to catch.
