cruising

August 20, 2026

17th August… an ending… for now…

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.

August 16, 2026

16th August…bowels, Barra and Canna…

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.

August 14, 2026

14th August…finally back at sea…heading south from Tarbert…

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.

August 11, 2026

11th August…Tarbert, Isle of Harris…opportunity and lobster…

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…

August 10, 2026

10th August…on to Harris…

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!!

August 7, 2026

August 7th

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…

August 5, 2026

August 5th…back to the old girl….

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!

June 21, 2026

19th to 21st June… winding down, gradually, and a final sail.

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…

June 17, 2026

June 17… time for something other than the sitting-down version of “activity.”

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…

June 7, 2026

Saturday 6th June…another 5am alarm!

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.