I’ve been in Scotland too long. It’s not that I’m not enjoying it (I’m loving it) but I’ve started to self-diagnose a degree of over-confidence with anchoring in interesting places, often really very close to scary rocks, and even sailing under terrifyingly low bridges. When I get home I shall start doing daft things like anchoring under the breakwater in Cowes, just because I can, or trying to get under Rochester Bridge at low water (no, I did it in a Laser once and it was very unpleasantly dark and full of whirlpools).
The last few days have been unplanned, in that I planned to be somewhere else, so faced with bits of loch that aren’t even on Alan’s map I have been just picking places at random that look interesting – and perhaps that’s why I have found myself doing things that a month or two ago I would have considered reckless, just to make it interesting.
Take, for example, the ruined castle on Lismore island that I fancied visiting. There is a bay that you’re advised to anchor in, sheltered from the horrid wind that had spoiled my Sunday in the Sound of Mull. When I got there, I found there was a bay within the bay, ringed by rocks. Less of a bay, more of a rock pool. Those nice amateur chart chaps had surveyed it and it was too shallow to anchor in – unless you have a lifting keel of course! It got down to 2m at one stage so I didn’t actually have to lift the keel up but I wouldn’t have gone in there if I’d had a fixed keel, just in case.
Apparently it belongs to a seal. He was obviously really put out, and kept popping up and glaring at me, first from ahead and then behind. After a while he made a noise like a huge whoopie cushion and went to spent the night with his cousins in another bay. I also annoyed some sea kayakers the next morning who had got themselves all wet and cold paddling miles from somewhere to see the deserted bay to find a bloke in a boat frying bacon and eggs and black pudding and no longer the least bit wet or cold.
Then the sun came out and Horrid Sunday began to feel like a distant memory. The wind had completely disappeared, so since it was mainly motoring, and I found myself pottering around the big bit of water that leads up to Fort William, and is variously and confusingly called the Firth of Lorn, then the Lynn of Lorn, then Loch Linnhe, and sometimes the Lynn of Morvern just to break the sequence. I’d seen it stretching off into the distance with mountains on either side like some giant hall of mirrors, thinking how odd it would be to disappear up there, past Ben Nevis, nearly 50 miles from the open sea by the time you get to to the top. I wasn’t going to motor 100 miles there and back to find out, so I selected various interesting-sounding lochs on either side to visit.
Loch a Choire is nothing if not interesting sounding, and made a good lunch stop – in the middle of the empty Morvern peninsula it’s surrounded by little estate cottages which you can rent for a week’s solitude. I was now so blasé about anchoring that I pitched up more or less in this one’s front garden.
Dallens Bay in the Sound of Shuna was a fun place to stop for the night because you have to wriggle through a channel 20 metres wide, but when you get there there’s another yacht station run by English people, this time a cheerful ex-Army chap in red trousers. I’ve noticed that people wearing red trousers are much more likely to identify Itchenor Sailing Club than those wearing other colours, and indeed he was keen to tell me about the family holidays of his youth in Chichester and West Wittering. I liked this yacht station very much as they had showers, a pub up the road and an amazing castle that you can snap from the beer garden:
Also the best sunset I have ever seen from what could loosely be termed a marina:
Looking at the Big Book of Lochs it was obvious that Loch Leven had to be visited, but there was a drawback: it has a bridge across the entrance that is only 16m above High Water Springs (non-sailors – the highest the tide is ever supposed to be, therefore the minimum clearance. Note the use of the word ‘supposed’). But – and I can scarcely believe it even now – my new-found cockiness was such that I worked out my actual height from first principles and went for it. For safety, I put my workings on the PSSA forum and invited independent verification which duly came from fellow owner Martin Hargreaves who even – thank you again Martin – texted me his workings as he knew I might be otherwise engaged motoring towards a terrifying bridge. We both agreed that the top of a Parker 325’s mast is definitively 15.5m above the water. A mighty 50cm clearance then! No, I am chicken, I went in at low water which gave me two extra metres. But I relaxed enough to video it this time:
It was well worth it. Loch Leven is at the foot of Glencoe and surrounded by spectacular mountains. It also has lots of little islands which – if you are now a carefree rock-hopper like me – you can go and anchor behind, or even between. So I did.
Remote Loch Leven isn’t. That bridge is the main road down Glencoe to Fort William so this beautiful loch is sadly full of the sound of traffic. It’s also spawned a rash of spa hotels (well, three) all of whom seemed to have fleets of kayaks and paddleboards so while I sat and ate my lunch and looked at the incredible views I was subjected to a range of bits of free advice from kayakers and paddle boarders encouraging each other.
Paddle boarding is one of those silly sports that isn’t a sport, it’s just pointless. I am sure people only do it because they see other people doing it. That’s why I have a paddle board with me, because other people have them, not because I want one. And also why, instead of taking the dinghy ashore to explore St Mungo’s Island like they would have done in Swallows and Amazons, I blew up the paddle board and took that instead. The pilot book mentioned a ruined chapel which sounded fun; it didn’t add that the entire island seemed to be one big graveyard, completely untended and visited only by paddleboarders on holiday. Luckily it was a very sunny day or I would have been unnerved, and probably fallen off the paddle board on the way back.
I did manage to find a corner of the loch that was away from the main road and the paddleboarders, and I’m glad I made the effort to come this far up, as the mountains were an amazing backdrop.
One more night amongst the mountains before heading back to Oban to meet the Penmans, and I decided that this would take rocky recklessness to new levels. In the middle of the Firth of Lynn or Lorne or Linnhe or whatever, between Lismore and the mainland, is a little group of islets called The Creags. I had seen photos of boats anchored off a white beach that looked like the Carribean, strangely joining two islets like a dam. It’s not a safe anchorage, just a tiny island you can anchor off and only any good, as the pilot says, “in settled weather”. Well it had been settled all week with no wind to speak of, but due to go completely calm and then swing 90 degrees in the night, so no one anchorage would be completely safe.
Ha! With my new-found cockiness, I had a plan for that one too. I would anchor in the right place for the evening, then when it got dark and the wind was due to shift, I would simply re-anchor on the newly sheltered side. What a palaver, but by now I wasn’t going to let a small matter like windshifts spoil my fun. I duly anchored off the white beach sheltered from the gentle southerlies (it being Scotland, they weren’t as gentle as promised) and went ashore.
This was better than the Carribean, because one of the islets was covered in blackberries – and being in the middle of the Lynn of Thing there were no birds other than seagulls, and it would appear that they don’t like blackberries, so I filled my boots. Tupper box actually, I even went back to the boat to get it. Then I had supper, read a book, waited for the wind to die, pottered around in the dark to the new anchoring spot I’d identified earlier and casually re-anchored. Well worth the effort: I woke in the morning completely sheltered and calm:
I poked my nose around the other side of that tiny island and it was blowing 18 knots. There were white horses. My, how cocky I felt, and smug with it.
It’s all change now, with that wind and a weekend of big breeze forecast – so who knows what will happen? Probably flat calm, but it’s a sign of how Scottish my sailing has become that I’m prepared to play fast and loose with rocks and bridges, but I am very wary of feisty forecasts. Stand by for more changes of plan.
Blue Moon's trip around the UK 
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