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 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.

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.

June 6, 2026

June 2nd to 5th…a new chapter in chilly climes…

We are back on Heydays having spent some time back home, renewing our acquaintances with grandchildren, gardens/allotments and general domestic stuff.

Chris is not with us for this leg so it’s just John, James and Yee Tak driving up to Inverness early on Tuesday morning. We take turns driving, 2 hours on and 2 hours off…a bit like being on watch for long sea passages. Breakfast in probably the best
motorway services in the country, at Gloucester Farm Shop, and apart from a few pottystops and hand-overs, we get to Heydays by early evening and it’s great to be back on board…and she smells good too!

We have a couple of day’s worth of jobs planned…including new valves for the toilet…who says sailing is all glamour.

Friday morning and a 5.30am alarm gets us up if not raring. We were woken at times in the night as the rigging was whistling and vibrating in the wind, and the rain lashed down with a fierce drumming on the roof…not conditions conducive to a good sleep. The
forecast is for westerly winds F4 to 6, but with showers for most of the day. The main
reason for relinquishing our pillows so early, is so that we can get the strong ebb current out under the bridge and through the Channory Narrows. We get fully togged up as not only are we expecting rain, but the wind is chilly too.

We called Helmsdale Harbourmaster yesterday to check that there would be space for us, only to be told that due to a winter of South Easterly storms, the harbour and the entrance is silted up and that it is effectively closed to leisure boats. We explain that as a bilge keeler with limited draft, we are used to the south coast mud and are happy to take the ground. After a conversation with his boss, the very helpful Billy said that he
was happy to take us and that if we call when we are close, he will guide us in.

It is brilliant to get the boat ready for the open sea…checking sails, ropes and finalising
the navigation for the day.

Finally…we slip our mooring and slide out into the bright Inverness morning…

With the fresh breeze fine over the port quarter, we opt just for a genoa. Over the years we have found that the old girl sails really well like this, and is easy to tack down wind. The added note here is that we don’t need to push on too rapidly as we can’t enter
Helmsdale until 2.30 at the earliest.

As Inverness falls astern into a brightening sky, we are grateful for our early morning coffee. This is June, but with lots of layers stuffing us up, it feels more like February.

We zig zag through the narrows and then we see them…our first dolphins of this leg. Sadly for us they are more interested in their own breakfast than playing or allowing their photo to be taken, but it is still lovely to see them…

We settle in to the usual pattern of a longish passage, the autohelm doing its job and us watching for the usual pot buoys. Of other ships we see nothing, just a small coaster pushing out eastwards.

The rain comes and goes and we are thankful for our wet weather gear, but when the sun deigns to make an appearance we are quite pathetically grateful…but it really lifts the spirits.

Lunch of hot soup and bread is a real treat…

…and soon we are contacting Billy the harbourmaster to guide us in across the new sandbanks. We line up the marks and then with a sharp turn into the harbour as instructed we are in and Billy is there to take our lines. 9 years ago we were the first yacht of the season to visit Helmsdale, this year we are also the first of the season to attempt the entrance. Just as we make fast our lines, the sky opens (again) and we retreat inside to dry off.

Billy has only been doing the job for a couple of months, as he used to be a regular fisherman. Now, with a couple of hip ops behind him, his son has the boat and Billy helps out from time to time, although he still has a small boat of his own which he uses occasionally. Mostly they catch crab, lobster and langoustines which they sell to local restaurants and hotels.

We opt for an afternoon nap and when we wake up, we find that Billy has left us a tub of crab meat. He is due to go out this evening with his son and so we say goodbye and just realise again how friendly and helpful the harbourmasters are up here.

Helmsdale has clearly seen better days, and the storms and silting of the harbour will do nothing to help. With a few forty winks under our eyelids, we head off for a wander round…

to the ‘famous’ La Mirage fish and chip restaurant. It is renowned for its huge portions, its glitzy pink décor and its famous attraction for Barbara Cartland who was apparently a frequent visitor. Under new owners the portions are less enormous, but we still can’t finish everything. We head back to Heydays considerably heavier than when we left and prepare ourselves for another early tide to catch.

May 15, 2026

May 14th…No sign of Nessie…

To be fair, Nessie himself (herself? Themselves?), could have given us a scaly tap on the shoulder or swum around the boat taking selfies, and we would barely have registered, through the driving rain and gloom.

The day started a bit dampish as we slipped the lines and began the descent of the 5 lock flight to Loch Ness . Once again we were in the company of Ian and Maureen on Andiamo. As we passed the Lock Inn, three of us (OK…Ian, John and James) were reminded that the beer and whisky went down really well, and that this morning we feel slightly less than our best…we dont get much sympathy…

Through the swing bridge and Loch Ness opens out into a wide and deep stretch of straight water. The wind was directly on the nose (of course), and at times, sent sheets of water barrelling down the loch. We kept the cockpit cover up and at least kept dry through the worst of the squalls…

The Loch is around 20 miles long, so we settled in for a 3 to 4 hour passage. From time to time the rain stopped and the Loch teased us with glimpses of beauty and colour in the sunlight…

At its northern end, Loch Ness becomes narrow and changes into Loch Dochfour. Its just like cruising up a river. The wind has died, the sun toys around with us…

…and as we see more excursion boats taking trippers to see ‘Nessie’, we realise that our solitude and tranquility are slowly diminishing as we get closer to Inverness, now only a few miles away.

Dochgarroch is busy, but the two boats manage to find some berths above the lock. This is something of a tourist hotspot as the departure point for boat trips to Loch Ness. The cafe is nice, but the gift shop most definitely knows its tourist market and charges accordingly. Whisky has less of an attractuion tonight and we’re all tucked up and in bed before 10pm…so much for a rock and roll lifestyle…

May 12, 2026

May 11th…The Caledonian Canal

We’re booked in to start our transit of the canal for 9am, so a relatively leisurely start, giving time to have a look at a huge cruise boat coming out… she barely fits…

…and then tea, coffee and a shower…not so. At 8.30 the lock master comes along to say that we are expected and can we please join 3 other boats already in the lock. John and Yee Tak almost break into a trot to get back on board, and then a less than leisurely few minutes getting thge right ropes, fenders etc ready for the deep locks ahead.

The first one (the sea lock) is easy…

However, ahead of us is the famous Neptune’s Staircase. A flight of 7 locks…all of them deep. There are 4 boats going through, a couple of very big, but skittish racing yachts which move around a lot in the turbulent waters of the locks when the sluice gates open.

With three of us ashore tending ropes, we look on a bit too smugly at how well Heydays behaves…perhaps we’ll get our come-uppance!

The back drop to the locks and the whole canal is stunning. I know I’ve used that word a lot, but I’m in danger of running out of superlatives…

We’re through and then cruise gently along the canal past a couple of swing bridges, while a train and cars patiently (we assume) wait for our little flotilla to pass.

We pass our final lock for today with the slightly confusing name of Gairlochy Lock. There is a quiet pontoon (with electricity for the fridge) and we’re tied up and hearing nothing but birdsong against the background of snowy mountains…

This is such an amazing place, not a sound save for birds and the occasional chuckle of water round the stern. We decide to stay for the night.

Postscript: One of the boats we have been in company with today is called Andiamo, a Jeanneau 32. They approach to come behind us on the pontoon, and we take their lines and generally help. We introduce ourselves and as always have to spell out Yee Tak’s name. “She’s from Hong Kong” we explain. “Oh” says Maureen (partner Ian) “I was born in Hong Kong and left in 1971 when I was 14”. What a coincidence… One thing leads to another and we invite them round for early evening drinks. Things then get even weirder… It turns out that Maureen and Yee Tak both went to the same school in HK (St Paul’s) and were both in the same year (although different classes). The rest of us watch on as bystanders at a school reunion, as they discuss the various teachers and nuns they had the fortune (or sometimes misfortune) to be taught by. It was lovely watching them reminisce back down to their schoolgirl days…

May 11, 2026

May 10th…a transformation and the start of the great glen…

By the time we made our way back across the water to the boat last night, the weather had already decided to give us a break. The gale that accompanied our arrival had eased considerably, still breezy, still a little lively in the dinghy, but nothing like the conditions of a few hours earlier. We returned aboard well fed, moderately windswept, and largely content…and went to bed without any great delay.

Morning brought a transformation… the loch was completely still, glassy and quiet, with perfect reflections of the mountains, the trees, and the little cottage opposite, in the waters around Heydays.

We had a schedule to keep, however. The narrows at Corran are a tidal pinch point midway up Loch Linnie, and this required us to pass through before the tide turned against us, so by eight o’clock we were underway, coffees in hand, gliding up Loch A Choire in conditions that bore absolutely no resemblance to yesterday’s arrival. We had hoped for a little wind as we turned out into Loch Linnie proper, but the loch had decided otherwise, and we motored on without complaint into what was, in fairness, a genuinely beautiful morning.

The narrows at Corran were quiet, save for a handful of motorcyclists waiting for the cable ferry on the far bank, and not much else. The Corran ferry skipper, we noted, was a more patient individual than his counterpart on the Studland crossing in Poole, where the approach with a yacht has an ambiguous quality…the ferry tending to depart at precisely the moment most inconvenient to all concerned. Here, he waited for us to pass before setting off, and we continued north with goodwill on all sides.

Loch Linnie narrows steadily toward its head, where Fort William sits on one shore, with Ben Nevis looming over…

…and the small town of Corpach on the other. Corpach is, in fact, the southern entrance to the Caledonian Canal, and we tied up at the community-run marina there — one of several such places in these waters, operated by local groups on something closer to goodwill and honesty boxes than the brisk commercial efficiency of larger marinas. Refreshingly so, even if refreshingly is doing some work in that sentence.

Formalities at the canal office were straightforward: forms, insurance details, facility keys, and a nine o’clock lock slot booked for the following morning. A seven-day canal pass, at £277 for the boat, gives ample time for the transit, most crews manage it in three or four days, but we intend to take our time and see something of the country on the way. Conveniently, seven days also brings us neatly to the point at which the four of us are planning to leave Heydays for a fortnight and head home, so the timing works rather well.

There is a small café beside the sea lock. We went in for coffee. This, as so often happens, evolved into fish and chips, loaded fries with haggis, and an excellent bowl of tomato soup, at which point we conceded that this constituted lunch and that, it being Sunday, a proper lunch was entirely in order.

We made our way back to the boat in the early afternoon moving, it must be said, with the slow plod of people who have eaten well. The rain arrived shortly after, and the mist settled low over the surrounding hills. The mountains are not quite the same in cloud as they are in sun, but they remain grand, and impressive, and it remains a privilege to be here, whatever the weather is doing.

Tomorrow: the canal begins.

May 10, 2026

May 9th… Tobermory to Loch a Choir

Following the established morning routine of tea and coffee administered from a horizontal position, we eventually achieved sufficient motivation to prepare the vessel for departure. The plan: retrace our wake down the Sound of Mull, turn to port at the bottom, and proceed up Loch Linnhe, with an overnight stop in Loch a Choire, before continuing to Corpach/Fort William and the entrance to the Caledonian Canal.

A brief foray ashore for last-minute provisions, then into the sailing gear. The day was bright and clear, but the sun and wind seemed not to have agreed on who was coming out on top today.

We slipped the mooring just after 1pm, under a double-reefed main and headed out into what proved to be a near-dead run.

The Sound of Mull funnelled gusts down its steep sides with its customary lack of subtlety, and we maintained a respectful level of concentration to avoid any accidental gybes. A handful of sailing boats were beating up toward Tobermory…

…we kept clear as required and got on with our afternoon.

Soup and sandwiches did their job, but he scenery did considerably more than its job. The sailing was glorious, with little cottages and hidden beaches…

Bearing away into Loch Linnhe, the wind came more firmly onto the quarter, which improved both the boat speed and the general atmosphere on deck. We also noted not for the first time that sailing in enclosed waters has a distinct psychological advantage over open passages: there is always something to aim for. In this case, a succession of large and impressive mountains (although not to Chris, who comes from a land of properly high mountains called the Rockies…), which are considerably more encouraging than a featureless grey sea.

As the afternoon wore on, the wind increased and began to head us, so we dropped to motor-sailing under the main alone. Purists may raise an eyebrow, but it kept us in the sheltered inshore waters, made use of the weaker tidal streams, and, crucially, kept things manageable as the gusts crept above 30 knots approaching Loch a Choir. The reefs earned their keep.

Mainsail furled, we motored the final stretch directly into 30-plus knots, running through the options for anchoring or mooring in what the pilot book diplomatically describes as subject to “often violent squalls in strong winds.” The pilot book, on this occasion, was not exaggerating.

The Old Boat House restaurant at the head of the loch, keeps a few mooring buoys for visiting boats. Only one other vessel was in residence, sensibly so, given the conditions, and we picked up a free buoy with the quiet relief of people who had been giving the anchoring question rather more thought than we would have liked.

A call to the restaurant confirmed we were welcome to use the mooring overnight, whether or not we came ashore to eat. A generous gesture, really kind.

The backdrop was quite beautiful, mountains on all sides, the loch settled despite the wind, the light beginning to shift toward evening. We decided to go ashore for dinner.