nature

September 12, 2026

12 September…A real conundrum…stuck in Oban…

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.

Naturally brighten the image

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.

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 15, 2026

15th August…another day, another island…

The middle-of-the-night alarm is one of those unwelcome but necessary disciplines of anchoring somewhere remote …up to check the transits still line up and that Heydays hasn’t decided to go for a wander of her own. As it turned out, our concern was entirely wasted…she sat rock solid all night, unmoved and unmoving, while we lost sleep on her behalf.

Morning brought glorious compensation, a loch entirely deserted but for us, lit up in early sunshine. There is something properly magical about that kind of isolation, not another soul in sight, and it seemed almost a small betrayal to be thinking about leaving. But time was pressing, and Barra, one of the southernmost islands of the Hebrides, was calling, so coffee was made in mugs, breakfast promised for underway, and Heydays readied for the day. We weighed anchor in the early light, hauling up a good quantity of South Uist mud in the process, almost certainly the only part of the island we will actually touch, which seems a shame.

Out of the loch and past an island of disgruntled cormorants, we turn south. The wind is kind enough to stay in the west and give us a fine sail past South Uist and Benbecula. Then, at last, Barra itself, and the business of finding the entrance to Castlebay, a channel with enough rocks scattered about it to concentrate the mind. The name, it turns out, is not merely decorative…there is indeed a castle sitting right in the middle of the bay. Kisimul Castle (we learn later!) is Norse in origin, the MacNeils’ seat for several centuries, and a reminder that these waters were Norwegian long before they were Scottish.

The marina is tiny, community-run, and home to only a couple of other visiting boats. We wandered up into the bustling metropolis of Castlebay itself…bustling being a relative term here…to discover we had missed lunch at the hotel by a single minute. Consolation arrived in the form of the Café Kisimul down by the harbour, which turned out to be rather better than the alternative anyway…excellent Indian-themed wraps, an oddly named beer, and a sunny spot outside in one of the loveliest villages at the tip of the Hebrides. We had assumed, reasonably enough, that the café’s name was a nod to its Indian menu. We were entirely wrong — it is named, of course, for the castle in the bay.

An all too brief wander around the little town and we have a feel for life at this southerly end of the Hebrides…

We fell to musing, as one does in places like this, on how small remote communities are obliged to pull together in ways the mainland forgets. One final observation…where the northern isles remain firmly under the Scottish Church’s Sabbath…everything shut on a Sunday… Barra feels different, and not only in temperament. It is the Catholic Church that dominates the town physically here, and, remarkably, there are places open on a Sunday.

August 13, 2026

13th August…it’s an ill wind…

It is an ill wind, they say, which has kept us in harbour a further day. After a lazy start, we made the best of it with a walk up to a small headland above the loch and Heydays, from where the views were stunning. We passed a scatter of houses which the harbourmaster assured us were probably still crofts in the old sense, smallholdings rather than museum pieces, still worked in whatever hours their owners can spare from the rest of life.

Against the general greyness of the day, the heather, lichen, seaweed, and even some old boats, took on an amazing vividness, each competing for the most inspiring colour in a Hebridean palette that otherwise runs to fifty shades of granite…

Two hours of walking left us feeling pleased with ourselves in the particular way that only mildly strenuous exercise in bad weather can produce. Back on board we occupied ourselves with the small maintenance tasks that expand to fill the time available, then sat down to an early dinner of pies and fishcakes from the local deli, preceded by what seemed at the time a excellent idea, namely mojitos, and undone by the discovery that the Bacardi had reduced itself to a single, unhelpful dribble. A dash to the shop before closing followed. Some things are not negotiable, and pre-dinner cocktails are among them.

The evening brought the promise of live music at the pub, which proved sufficient cause for Chris and Yee Tak to abandon sailing togs in favour of something resembling respectability. The guitarist, backed by the sort of electronic box that has replaced entire rhythm sections in small venues the world over, worked his way through the usual soft-rock repertoire, but came alive properly when he turned to folk material and a couple of songs in Gaelic. We rather wished he’d done more of the latter, though the room, mostly holidaymakers like ourselves, responded more readily to the covers. Gaelic speakers were evidently thin on the ground that night…

August 12, 2026

12 August…not so glorious fog…

We wake to one of the thickest fogs and a ferry looming out still gloomy, even though only meters away…

We’re also fascinated by a remote controlled survey vessel which has been surveying the sea bed beteween here and Skye in order to find a route for a new electricity supply cable. Slightly spooky in the fog, made even more so by the all too frequent news of the work of unmanned drones in warfare…

Today is the day we pay attention to the old girl’s bottom and we tie up by the harbour wall with the ever helfull Kiki the harbourmaster and his partner Kim on hand to take lines …and chat. There follows a waiting game while she dries out.

This corner of Harris is very nearly its own island — a ten-minute walk across the isthmus gets you to the little harbour on the Atlantic side…just the odd cormorant who we manage to annoy…

With the tide out and the old girl’s bottom exposed, we got to work with the pressure washer. Coppercoat has served us well, though as suspected we’d picked up a bit of weedy fouling in Ullapool — antifouling protection, we’re learning, varies enormously around these shores. A few scuff marks later, she was looking respectable again, and a bowl of Cullen Skink in the hotel was calling — thick, creamy, and thoroughly committed to fish.

We stayed through the afternoon waiting for the water to return, a wait made considerably more bearable by a scone and a cream tea. By early evening we had water under the keel again and headed back to the berth in a gathering drizzle.

Footnote: today was also the day of the eclipse. Thick cloud and thicker drizzle meant we could only read about the wondrous scenes back home as the moon briefly took charge of the sun. Undeterred, as the evening slid from merely gloomy to very gloomy indeed, we put the eclipse specs on anyway.

August 8, 2026

August 8th and the Sabbath….Inspired by Peter May…

Last year, in Arklow, we fell into conversation with a couple on a boat called Restless (Ann and Tim) on the strength of restless having “Stornoway” painted on her transom. Since we had hopes of getting here ourselves one day, this seemed sufficient grounds for a chat. It transpired she was actually from Oban, and it was they who first pointed us towards Peter May, a local author responsible for a trilogy of detective thrillers set up predominantly in Lewis and Harris. We have all now read them, and are agreed that they are really pretty good. A visit to the tourist information office gave us a leaflet and map identifying the key locations, and we have been treating the island as a literary I spy ever since.

We should note for the sake of accuracy, that the weather has been grim since our arrival and shows no sign of improving before Monday. As this is being written the wind is getting through the rigging at an alarming rate, comfortably over 25 knots, with a noise best described as something out of a cheap horror movie. Monday looks more promising, so in the meantime we have hired a small car for a couple of days of land-based sightseeing, weather having made the sea-based variety unadvisable.

The castle, it turns out, is a relative newcomer as these things go, nineteenth century, and for all its grandeur carries a history one would not choose to have inscribed on a family crest. One James Matheson made his fortune selling opium to the Chinese, a detail of particular interest to Yee Tak given the wider history of Hong Kong, and used the proceeds to buy up a dilapidated castle, which he then rebuilt entirely, having first cleared the local crofters and demolished a village that had the temerity to interrupt his view. A most public-spirited gentleman.

The attached museum, happily, redeems the visit, compact enough not to feel like a forced march, and full of genuinely good material on Hebridean life. A lovely lady there took us thoroughly under her wing, and was so taken with the subject of Alyth McCormack’s wedding that, well past closing time, she was still pulling photographs from drawers to talk us through a dress woven in fine white Harris Tweed. (Alyth McCormack is a noted local Gaelic singer, long associated with The Chieftains.)

From there we repaired to McNeill’s Bar, another haunt of Fin Macleod, Peter May’s detective, we are trying hard not to turn into some sort of Hebridean version of I-Spy, with limited success. It is a proper old-fashioned boozer, refreshingly unburdened by gastro-pub pretensions or artisanal olive oil.

The night delivered pounding rain and rigging-whistling wind in equal measure, neither showing the slightest inclination to ease off by dawn. We heard that a cruise ship, due in, had abandoned the attempt and pressed on to Iceland instead, apparently they could have got in well enough, but the forecast made getting back out again look unwise.

We started our little car tour by visiting the site of a disastrous shipwreck just ouside Stornaway. The Iolaire was carrying navy reservists home for leave when, with an inexperienced skipper and crew, she struck the rocks which we hasd passed just a day earlier. The sites of these tragedies are always quite emotional to visit, but this was made all the more poignant by the fact that we visited in a near gale and could understand the horror of men losing their lives just a few meters from the shore…

It became apparent to us, speaking to some local folk, that this is still a raw and needless tragedy which touched most families on Lewis…

Our little car excursion then took us through the geography of the novels proper: the house Fin grew up in, his aunt’s house, the site of the fictional body’s discovery, the church and the manse, all real, all rather wonderful to stand in front of. Despite the driving rain and gale-force wind, or perhaps somewhat because of them, we felt we were beginning to understand these remote and occasionally inhospitable islands — and perhaps even to glimpse why they might incline towards a dour and faintly vengeful strain of Christianity.

The little harbour at the very northern tip of Lewis, Point of Ness, seems impossibly tight and narrow to even think of entering in calm weather, let alone in the 140 out of 360 days when a gale blows…

The island tradition was of ‘Black Houses’…simple stone cottages with double thick walls and rooves of thatch held in place by netting and they feature heavily in the novels. The accommodation was often shared with the animals and a peat fire was lit right in the middle of the main living area. The village here, was inhabited until the early 70s when the last inhabitants were moved into modern council houses…

Peat is still very much in use as an everyday fuel…

The black houses were gradually replaced in the early 20th century by the ‘white houses’…

We ended up back at McNeill’s, where a local musician was giving the assembled company precisely what it wanted — everything from the Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond to the Proclaimers’ 500 Miles — sung with tremendous enthusiasm by band and early-evening drinkers alike, the latter well on their way to becoming the genuine article.

…the sabbath…

Tesco have only recently been allowed to open on a Sunday (noon to 8pm to enable the locals to go to church), for the rest of Lewis and Harris (the ‘protestant’ islands) nothing is open…

Without even a hot coffee on offer, we pack a lunch and set out for the beaches of the very rugged West Coast. The drive is stunning and the landscape is rugged…and there is the inevitable norse chessman…

…and the beaches are incredible, tempting the hardier members of the crew in for a brief dip…

The weather is set fair for us to press on tomorrow, which will mean a reasonably early start, but for now, back aboard Heydays, we find ourselves musing on this corner of the Hebrides, and drawing, inevitably, comparisons with Orkney. This is, to our admittedly first impressions, a markedly less prosperous society, and one in which the rather austere Church of Scotland continues to exercise real influence. Sunday here is still observed as the Sabbath, and external entertainment is neither permitted nor, in practice, available. The towns lack something of the vibrancy and gaiety we found further north, though the scenery more than compensates. We find we can manage perfectly well without shops or pubs on a Sunday; it rather forces one into simply inhabiting the present, and being part of a place quite different from the frantic, consumption-driven south we normally call home.

It is also, we have noticed, a place that attracts a rather higher calibre of adventurous sailor than we are used to, a marked departure from the “only leave the marina on a fine day” school of seamanship more commonly encountered in Lymington. There was the New Zealand couple on their steel Van der Staadt, Dutch-built, currently planning a passage to Norway before crossing the Atlantic (for the third time) en route home. There was the Dutch singlehander who had just come in from the Faroes, two days of it thoroughly rough. And there was Restless, mentioned above, who completed their second Atlantic crossing only last year. These islands, it is fair to say, are not simply just another part of the country.

Footnote: A large French boat arrived in harbour this evening, with what appeared to be a very odd black and white flag flying. We then realise that this ‘flag’ was in fact a very large (and presumably very expensive) genoa split from tack to clew (side to side|). After a big struggle they finally got it under control and dropped on deck…this is a sober reminder that these waters can catch even the cautious and well prepared…

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 16, 2026

June 16th…along the rugged coast…

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.

June 8, 2026

Monday 8th …back with an old friend

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.