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.