I hate sailing under bridges. Luckily it doesn’t happen very often in this country. I gather that if I sailed on the Eastern Seaboard of the US (why do they call it that? What’s wrong with the East Coast like the rest of us?) you would do it all the time on account of all the swanky islands that need to be connected by freeways to the rest of the country.
There’s not such call for freeways in the Outer Hebrides, so I was a little surprised to find this bridge spanning the channel I was planning to sail up.
I say surprised, not really, it was on the chart and in the pilot book, and to be honest I so dread sailing under bridges that I had actually planned to go a few miles further round and enter East Loch Tarbet by the wider entrance used by the ferries. But the friendly woman from the marina was keen that I got there quickly as she wanted to get her lift home, the ferry was due and if I got in its way there would be trouble, and she had been turning boats away all day because there was a windy day or two coming. So the surprise came when I took a deep breath, double checked my sums and turned up Scalpay Sound, under the bridge.
I didn’t hit it of course, there was a full five metres between the top of the mast and the underneath of the bridge, but let me tell you when your mast is 15 metres high that really doesn’t feel like much. In my experience, any bridge, no matter how high, feels like you are going to hit it because of the angle you’re looking at it. I was scared sailing under the Cleddau bridge with Andrew…
…and under Drogheda bridge with Roger…
..and they had stacks of height. I have never sailed under a bridge with only a handful of metres clearance before. What if the tide had miraculously been a couple of metres higher than predicted? What if the Parker 325 Owner’s Handbook had got the mast measurement wrong? What if I had converted feet to metres the wrong way round? All these thoughts and more went through my head as we were swept towards it on the tide. I tried to video it for fun but bottled out: there were also some children on the bridge, and being more familiar with the M25 than the Isle of Harris I worried that they might drop things on me.
It makes me shiver just to watch the video. But I did get in to the marina before the friendly people went home, before the ferry ran me down, before the wind came, and before the shop shut.
It was all my fault. I had phoned and booked a berth because I needed to get south and there was wind and torrential rain promised for two days, and I couldn’t face being stuck in an empty loch again. Unusually for a marina they had phoned me back that morning to check I was coming, but this was because everyone had seen the same forecast and wanted a berth, and they were now full. I said I’d be there by four, but the sun was out, it was the last chance to sail for a couple of days, and I really wanted to visit the Shiant Islands, a tiny group of tiny islands off the coast of Lewis. It was well worth the detour: they are sheer-sided lumps of rock with thousands of seabirds wheeling around, and many of them just sitting in the water for no apparent reason. Best of all some of them were actual puffins right next to the actual boat, but the pictures are all rubbish so I won’t show you them unless you doubt me.
A far better photo is this one of what is optimistically termed a ‘holiday bothy’ on the shingle beach between two of the islands. You could book this thinking you could wander around the islands meeting puffins, then realise you can only walk on the flat bit which is about 300 metres long, because the rest is vertical cliffs. Perhaps the same man with the helicopter who drops the sheep onto the top gives you a lift up once in a while.
I didn’t tell the nice woman in the marina that I was late because I had gone to look at some puffins, mainly because as soon as she had checked me in she was in her friend’s car being driven home.
Yet again the forecast got it all wrong. Saturday was supposed to be crazy wet and very windy, Sunday possibly sailable. Needless to say I awoke to a revised Scottish ‘now-cast’: they had looked out of the window and seen it was neither windy nor wet, but by then I had decided to stay put and didn’t fancy risking it. With no rain now forecast until teatime I unfolded the boat bike and – still feeling guilty about hiring the car – resolved to cycle out to Scalpay Island to look at the bridge.
That turned out to be an epic journey. The boat bike has tiny wheels and is really far too small for me, so my knees stick out sideways and I suspect I resemble one of those chimps on unicycles they used to have in the circus, supposedly. The road was tiny and went up and down lots of hills and my knees hurt after just one of the 14 miles I had committed to cycling. But it ticked a rather extreme fitness box, and allowed me to discover that the bridge is a bit less beautiful from the top than underneath, and that it seems to link a village of about twenty houses with a single track road. Nonetheless it is one of the Outer Hebrides’ biggest infrastructure things and was opened by Tony Blair, who became the first serving Prime Minister to visit the Outer Hebrides. So there you are.
More excitingly, someone was coming under the bridge in a yacht about the same size as Blue Moon, so I could see for myself how terrifying it must be from on high. Sadly it wasn’t at all, he looked miles away, but was grateful for the pictures when I saw him in the marina later.
Having reached Scalpay village I sat down to eat my picnic and the inevitable happened. The forecast decided it had been right after all, the wind started howling again and it poured with rain. The cycle back was one of the more miserable I have ever done, and I was so comprehensively soaked that I resolved not to leave the warm dry boat for 24 hours, a resolution I comfortably kept, largely because the rain didn’t stop until Monday morning.
Finally time to leave the Outer Hebrides and head back to the mainland – I am meeting Neil in Mallaig and since the poor man will spend two whole days travelling for three days’ sailing it would be rude to be late. After the wilds of the Western Isles Skye looked positively populous: sometimes I could see several houses at the same time. It also has my candidate for most interesting lighthouse design:
It sits just underneath the Cuillins, which even on a sunny day look a bit menacing.
But after a few days tied onto a pontoon looking at the rain, it was a good change to find a very quiet little pool on the island of Soay (calling it a harbour is a bit much) from which you can look at the sun set on the Cuillins without too much worry they are going to come and menace you in the night. Apparently Gavin Maxwell ran a basking shark processing plant here, which sounds llike a daft idea at the best of times. Why would you process a basking shark? Clearly it didn’t go well and he was forced to make up stories about otters instead. With views like this I’d find it hard to concentrate on whatever process the basking sharks got.
And so to Mallaig, a tiny fishing village but after the lochs of Harris and Lewis and Uist, and even the destertedness of Soay, it feels like Piccadilly Circus. It is rammed with tourists, there is a queue for the marina, and there is a railway station, which is lucky for Neil as he is coming by train.
Blue Moon's trip around the UK 
Leave a comment