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…

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…