Most of them rather pleasant, you’ll be pleased to hear, and Tim will be relieved to read, since I spent most of the week in his company. No surprises there, let alone unpleasant ones, which was handy since it occurred to me that it is very many years indeed since we were last in a boat together.
Surprise One was getting on the train to Oban. This is beginning to feel like a commute now, and generally involves fighting for a seat more aggressively than on the Northern Line, but not it would appear at the end of August. The only people in my carriage were two groups who discovered as they sat down opposite each other that they were going to the same wedding on Coll. This was a cue for massive consumption of champagne and gin which only ran out around Loch Awe. They didn’t offer me any, but I didn’t begrudge them: they must be pretty good friends to travel for a day and half across Scotland for a wedding where they were going to sleep in the tents they had brought.
Surprise Two was when I got off the train and headed into town past the pontoons where on our first visit back in June people were fighting for the last space. Deserted. Well, nearly. About six boats. At this point I began to panic – the sailing season in Scotland was clearly over. I’d been worried about staying north so long, and now I really was concerned that I’d encounter gales, rain, closed pubs and dour Scots laughing at the mad English who left too late. I was distracted by an actual Blue Moon which everyone on the ferry over to the marina thought was very funny as I climbed into its namesake’s cockpit, but then they had been in the restaurant all evening celebrating someone’s birthday.
Surprise Three was next morning when I’d pottered over to the still-worryingly empty pontoons. In amongst the tedious morning-long piping (there was a cruise liner in the bay and they get schoolkids to come and pipe the visitors ashore) there was a banging and whistling of non-bag-pipes and drums and – phew, not the Orangemen, but more surprising still: it was Oban Pride.
I counted about a dozen of them, half of whom were actually in Village People kit, surrounded by what must have been all of Oban’s police force, the fire engine and the ambulance too in case they actually set the town alight. Hats off though, for all that I am now very fond of Oban I doubt it’s an easy place to be Out and Proud. I bumped into a few later, eating fish and chips on the quay, and they were getting some odd looks.
Now for Surprise Four, the big one, and time I stopped counting as it’s getting tedious and this one applies to the whole week. Freaked by the emptiness of the pontoons and the marina, I had been scanning the forecasts for evidence of impending doom, and they had been supplying it in the form of a wind that went into the south more or less the moment Tim stepped off the train, and then started blowing rather hard. Well, miraculously, the forecast was wrong yet again, but this time in our favour. It went South for a bit, but for once it never actually blew hard. I am still pinching myself sitting in Bangor over a week later. Not only did it not blow, it became absurdly hot and we spent most of the week in shorts, which annoyed Tim a lot as he had carried an unfeasibly wide range of heavy duty kit, much of it advertising dinghy championships from the last forty years, but by doing so had more or less guaranteed the September heatwave.
Not that this seemed likely for the first couple of days. We got some more typical Scottish experiences: motoring into a stiff breeze to Puilladobhrain again was one (see Of whales and whirlpools. And rain.), to watch people hike over the hill to hike over the bridge over the Atlantic only to hike back after one pint, judging by the speed of their return. This did set us up for a rather epic Sunday beating a full 41 miles (yes, forty-one) into a stiff southwesterly to Colonsay. This satisfied Tim’s need to sail hard, and I have to admit to rather enjoying a proper thrash to windward, especially since we managed to make a couple of good calls on windshifts just like the old days (in our dreams). And Colonsay turned out to be a small but perfectly formed island, and confirmed that we were heading south by having the first actual green field I had seen for months, with actual cows in it.
Arriving was also quite a surprise, in that I had read about how proud they were of their new visitor moorings: they must have pretty good PR as it was all over the sailing press. Their PR agency had also massaged the story very effectively, having omitted to mention that the new moorings are in the bay next door to the harbour where all the action is, and when I say ‘next door’ I mean about a mile, having dinghied onto a deserted sandy beach and hiked over the top of a hill devoid of tracks or signposts. Luckily we met some jolly people from Falmouth who shared the experience, but they did the ‘one pint and back to the boat’ thing while Tim and I enjoyed The Colonsay Hotel’s kitchen properly. This did mean that we had to leg it rather smartly before the petits fours (figure of speech, there weren’t any) as it was getting dark. Another surprise – by September Scotland is no longer the land of the midnight sun, as we discovered when we decided to take one of my legendary off piste shortcuts around the headland and found ourselves blundering through what we think was bracken high above what probably was the beach with the dinghy on it but we’ll never be sure as all we could really see was stars and the masthead light.
Ankles miraculously untwisted, but seaboots totally shagged in Tim’s case, and flushed with the sense that luck was on our side, we decided that the following morning would be a good time to sail through the world’s third largest whirlpool. This wasn’t entirely mad, the pilot books did say that with luck, no wind and a following tide the fearsome Gulf of Corryvreckan (for once the Gaelic is less scary than the English ‘speckled cauldron’) would be the proverbial pussycat as long as we stuck to the edges where we wouldn’t get sucked in. Quite a surprise then, on approach, to spot and then hear what were clearly standing waves across our path. I did really begin to wonder at this point whether I should be allowed to keep my Coastal Skipper badge, and we also took the bit in the guide very seriously that talked about closing all the hatches, clipping on harnesses and generally hanging on tight while muttering Hail Marys. Pussycat it wasn’t: even in a flat calm there were waves a good two metres high, eddies and little whirlpools everywhere, and spray and mist hanging over it all as if we were on one of those boat trips under Niagara Falls.
By sheer skill (borne of fear, I freely admit) we avoided the worst of the waves, only putting the bow into two or three and only being spun 90 degrees off course a few times, just to justify the harnesses and the hatches, and before long we were being sped over the ground at 12 knots in flat water that only now and then disappeared down small plugholes, presumably to Davy Jones’ Locker.
The sun came out, stayed out for the next six days, and the wind generated by the tide was enough to blow away the smell of fear – at least until we got to the lovely Ardfern Yacht Centre where they had brand new showers which did the job a bit better, although we did have to repeat the trick after another of my navigational blunders took us through yet another bracken field, this time high up the side of the local mountain. At least there were views, and even there we could hear the Corryvreckan roaring from across the sound.
After two days of heroic derring-do we settled easily into holiday mode, with a couple of short trips. I had worried that after the wilds of the North West Frontier these more southerly bits would be dull and boring. Not a bit of it: you could make a whole book of postcards of Lochs Craignish (with Ardfern at the top) and Sween (with Tayvallich and the postcard-named Fairy Isles at the top).
What they lack in mountains they make up for in friendly little villages and pubs with good kitchens. We suspect the economics of this are to do with the increasing proximity to Glasgow and Edinburgh with the consequent increase in smartly done-up houses with no lights on in September, but we looked the other way and enjoyed the side benefits, certain (in my case) that our next night on the Isle of Jura would be bleak.
I’d once stood on Islay with a bloke from the Laphroaig distillery on what has to be the best business trip of all time, looking at the bleakest island I had ever seen. Islay is buzzing, with distilleries and farms and schools and shops and an airport; Jura had none of these. Well, one distillery to Islay’s ten or more. It appeared totally empty and my guide confirmed that was more or less so: in spite of being Scotland’s eigth largest island by area it is 31st by population – by far the least densely populated of the major islands, and amost all live in or around Craighouse, where the distillery is. I wanted to go, but rather assumed it would be like visiting a very small Sheerness, or perhaps Ryde without the pier.
How wonderfully wrong. I suppose the 24 degree heat and blazing sunshine may have coloured my view, but the locals assure us it is always like this. Craighouse probably wouldn’t make the picture postcard top 10 like Tayvallich, but it would get my vote as one of the best surprises of the trip. Sheltered bay with nice moorings and a dinghy pontoon, busy cafe and hotel, pleaseant walks through admittedly mainly infertile scrub, views everywhere of the very distinctive Paps of Jura, and even some palm trees.
To cap it all, after hiking up a very hot hill to look at the loch they make into whisky, we actually swam around the boat. Moored off Jura. Not a sentence (or two) I ever thought I would write.
The distillery runs 24/7 as they all do, which meant there was literally a buzz about the place which extended to a very jolly evening in the Jura Hotel bar where we found the first affordable lobster of the trip. We liked it so much we even went ashore again the next morning to explore the church and cemetery, which for some reason has stayed in a village a mile or two away which no longer exists and so is completely remote, with only a babbling burn running past to break the silence. After that bit of poetic reverie, it was good to come across some human interest in the shape of a woman taking her three dogs and a cat for a walk. We assumed the cat was lost, but no, she assured us that it comes with them every day. “She thinks she’s a dog” she said, as proud cat owners do, but on this occasion she was on the mark as the cat gambolled across a field with her canine friends.
And so to Gigha, the smallest island of the trip and – surprisingly again – one of the most densely populated, with a growing number of people joining the 160+ inhabitatants of an island only five miles long. It’s also one of the most fertile, with a dairy to its name making ice cream as good as Arran’s, and has amazing white sand beaches. Ardminish Bay is a very popular anchorage with a cafe, seafood shack and a hotel which is looking for a new tenant. Before you apply, be warned that the very Islington-y Boathouse Cafe is probably what nicked the hotel’s business. Right on the pontoon, it looks like something out of Conde Nast Traveller, with prices to match. We baulked at the £50 lobster and opted for boat cooking, but did take a little trip in the dinghy as it was my last night in Scotland and I wanted to set foot on it. Needless to say it came on to rain just for the time we went ashore, so I spent my last hour on Scottish soil sitting outside the Boathouse in my oilies drinking bottled beer and watching other people stuff their faces with overpriced seafood. I’ve been trying to find the amusing parallel in that for for about ten minutes and can’t.
Blue Moon's trip around the UK 
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