If any readers are left, they will remember that I was heading back to Oban to meet the Brothers Penman off the train, and that after four days of sunny calm I was motoring into a Force 5, with a forecast for more. The weekend – indeed the whole week – was a perfect illustration of the perils of yachting: I have two of the keenest sailors ever to walk the earth coming to spend a week’s valuable (in one case anyway) holiday sailing with me, and it’s forecast to blow very hard from the south all week. Where had we agreed to go? South, of course, to Jura. So before they even set foot on the train that plan had gone out of the window, to be replaced by an attempt to pick up some of the bits of Mull and its outliers that I had missed the last time the wind messed up my plans, and a warning that if it delivered on its promised to blow a full gale we might be seeing more of the Oban Museum than was good for us.
Having issued the warning, I made my first mistake. Faced with the possibility of being stormbound I pulled on my walking boots, jumped on the ferry to Lismore and took myself off to explore the island I had been sailing around for the last few days. I’d been keen to visit Lismore because it gave its name to the estate down the road from us in Gospel Oak which is where I thought Karl Marx eventually moved to when he made it out of Soho, but my Blog fact-checking reveals this as my second mistake: the Marxes moved to Maitland Park which is just over the road. I was right about him wanting to move to the suburbs and give his daughters piano lessons though, which has always tickled me as it goes to show that he was more of a philosopher than a proper Marxist. Discuss.
The original Lismore is rather prettier: Lios Mor is Gaelic for Great Garden and so it is, being much more fertile than its neighbours (or Gospel Oak), full of farms doing recognisable agriculture rather than crofting, and gardens full of recognisable (to a Southerner) flowers. It’s also home to a Gaelic heritage centre which – as all good heritage centres should – serves a mean Victoria Sponge, and a tiny church which was once the Cathedral of Argyll.
My little exploration was ten miles so I was quite weary when the ferry dumped me back in Oban, where I made another mistake: rather than go back to the boat and put my feet up I went via Tesco and did the big shop for the coming week, adding what felt like another couple of miles to the day’s jaunt in boots.
Then Andrew and Jamie arrived, we consulted the forecast over the first of the week’s excellent seafood dinners, and I realised what a bad decision I had made to go walking. Under the veneer of Soft Sussex Southerners the Penmans are hardy Scots, and a full gale means not a lazy day in the cinema but an opportunity to don walking boots and bag a Munro or two before lunch.
Luckily for me, Saturday dawned sufficiently windy that dogs were being blown off chains even in downtown Oban, and it was agreed that amateur mountaineers would be blown off the slopes of Ben Cruachan, the nearest and rather evil-looking Munro which has the added attraction of a major dam for Jamie to enlighten us about. Instead we treated ourselves to a (relatively, this is Scotland) low-level ramble around the coast to Dunstaffnage and back, and the most improbable third castle in three weeks. This one was a bit of a let down: I had expected more from the home of the murderous Campbells than a rather homely house with some crumbling walls attached, next to a very sheltered marina and a newly-built housing estate that would suit Ardrossan well (see Karma and calmer. And Ardrossan).
It also had no tea shop, which some might argue made the ten mile round trip a little disappointing. The view from the small-but-surprisingly-steep-especially-for-those-who’d-recently-hiked-around-a-middle-sized-island-and-a-big-sized-Tesco hill behind Oban made it worthwhile though, although I hadn’t bargained on walking 20 miles in two days.
Sunday was my birthday (thank you) and what finer way to spend it than sailing an unfeasibly long way in a stiff breeze to make up for the missed sail the day before? With 15-25 knots we knocked off the 50 miles to Ulva Ferry before tea, which was just as well as the candles would have blown out if we’d tried lighting them under way. The sail involved a bit of sightseeing past Iona…
…and confirmed that trying to spend the night anywhere on the South Coast of Mull in a southerly would have been a daft idea as it is entirely made of cliffs, rocks and waterfalls with an Atlantic swell making them simultaneously spectacular and scary. But after haring up what felt like a cul de sac in a building breeze, past an island that used to belong to the Mitfords with the improbable English name of Inch Kenneth (I can only think of Carry On), we found ourselves on a pontoon in the middle of nowhere in a very shallow sound with rather a lot of tide. As Storm Betty built and the rain pelted down it made using the temporary portaloo quite an adventure as it didn’t appear to be bolted down, but the pontoons made a safe and snug place to spend another day stormbound.
As we explored Ulva next day we came across several examples of the range of issues facing enthusiastic islanders. It’s a tiny island which makes Mull (its relative ‘mainland’) feel like the Isle of Wight. Recently sold to the islanders in one of the increasingly common community buy-outs, we could see a few issues. For a start, there are only six of them, which seemd to be enough to run a farm and a cafe which sold us fantastic local oysters and cake worthy of a heritage centre for lunch, but not enough to maintain let alone buy the big house which is a rather odd pile: listed because it is possibly the only example of Arts and Crafts meets 1950’s Modernism with a mock Regency interior in the world. If that’s your thing, Ulva needs you. Unsurprisingly, they’re still waiting for someone to come forward and the house is crumbling.
Even the garden presents problems: we met a group of volunteers who come over from Mull on the tiny ferry once a week to try and keep it in some sort of order, but nature and the rabbits (apparently Beatrix Potter was inspired here as well as the Lake District) are against them. Rum and Canna have Scottish Nature and the National Trust to support their infrastructure; Ulva relies on funding from the council which extends to a new facilities block more stormproof than the portaloo, but not to restoring a weird mansion. It’s a shame because the island is indeed lovely, with well-marked tracks to follow (we had had a day off walking so it was boots on again) and admirable efforts to repopulate an island which once had a population of 800. It felt like a slow and uphill struggle though, unlike our walking which had the incentive of getting back before the heavens opened. We still managed another six miles before Storm Betty unleashed her worst.
Two more islands with completely different characters followed. Staffa is home to Fingal’s Cave, with the result that you can go there on day trips from Oban and Tobermory, and it would appear that everyone does: there were no fewer than five boats queuing up to drop people off to see the cave, the basalt columns and puffins which are apparently so used to tourists that they pose for photos. Going ashore in the aftermath of Betty was out of the question for us but we reckoned our experience was closer to Mendelssohn’s, looking at the cave from a small boat heaving up and down on huge waves.
Staffa snapped, it was time to put some sails up for another cracking fast reach, this time a couple of hours to Coll via the Treshnish Islands, an odd little archipelago containing islands which look variously like a block of mouse cheese and a Mexican sombrero. It takes all sorts I suppose.
Coll is much more normal-looking and with 260 people felt positively buzzing. They’re obviously 260 of the most energetic people in Scotland as in Arinagour alone (what an odd name for a village) we found two shops, a Post Office, a primary school, a sailing school, a self-service petrol station, an airport, a distillery in a shed, a café and a brand new community centre containing a library, gym, meeting rooms, lounge, bunkhouse, and two important things for us: e-bikes and showers, in that order.
Speeding around the island on something other than our own two feet made a welcome change and allowed us to see just how successful a small island can be: apparently Coll is very fertile and has the lowest rainfall in Scotland, which perhaps explains why it’s a popular holiday destination and every other farmhouse seemed to have had the Grand Designs treatment. Best of all it has the Coll Hotel, where you can eat stupendous seafood and steak looking down the loch at your boat, so we did.
The community centre was hosting Scotland’s mobile cinema which was showing Indiana Jones and Barbie, but we opted for the hotel’s panna cotta and a wee dram or two back on board.
Having alternated sailing and walking we finally managed to combine the two by leaving early the next day (an easy decision: the wind had changed and our mooring was beginining to feel like a fairground ride) and heading back up to Salen on Loch Sunart, chosen on the basis that being not on the way to Oban it made for more sailing the next day, nothing to do with the cafe selling homemade cakes and locally distilled malt whisky. These Penmans do like their sailing, and I was happy to go back to Salen as there was a hill with great views that I’d wanted to climb on my previous visit and failed because I am a wimp that hates walking in the rain.
The combination meant that we demolished Jamie’s ‘legendary’ sausage casserole in short order and were ready to face beating down (or is it up?) the Sound of Mull the next day, ten days after I’d made such a meal of it on my own.
To my astonishment we made it back to Oban without a single tack and only an hour of motoring down a windless loch – just enough time for me to cook everything left in the fridge and call it breakfast. In fact it blew so hard and from such a helpful direction that we made it to Kerrera Marina (near Oban, but nicer) in time for the Penmans to suggest a final walk. Here the rain came to the rescue, falling as it so often seems to in Oban as if it wanted to punish us for daring to go outdoors, and the decision to hide in the cabin was unanimous. We had, however, sailed 135 miles and cycled another 15 in four days and I’d walked 30 miles in the remaining three, so I reckon I had earned a few days back home walking no further than The Emirates and sailing nowhere at all.
In case you’re wondering why the pictures on this post are better than usual, it’s because Andrew took most of them
Blue Moon's trip around the UK 
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