One of my purposes in writing this blog was to persuade people that I was undertaking a major adventure, not just taking three very long and self-indulgent holidays. I bristle when anyone I meet says things like ‘enjoy your holiday!’, no matter how well intentioned. They didn’t say that when Amundsen came past, did they? Or perhaps they did, in Inuit, and then fell about laughing when he thought they were wishing him luck*. However, I have to recognise that I have largely failed in this regard: in spite of attempts to spice it up a bit with tide races and near-sinkings; there have been one too many references to ice cream and fish and chips, and the record of my week in the Moray Firth will be the last nail in the coffin marked ‘adventure’.
*Months later I have realised I got my poles mixed up there. Or my explorers, or indigenous peoples, depending on which way you look at it.
One of the benefits of my extra year was that I could give the Moray Firth the attention it deserved by thoroughly exploring interesting places without a hint of holiday laziness. I had mapped out a full week of visiting harbours around the coast and refined it sitting on top of Ben Bhraggie with its panoramic view. The Moray Firth, for those who have not been compelled to look it up already, is that triangular bit of sea at the top of Scotland with Inverness bottom left, which is where I was headed. It is full of little fishing harbours, most of which either dry out or have sand bars at the entrance, which makes it ideal lift-keel country. My list included Lybster, Helmsdale, Lossiemouth, Nairn, Cromarty, Dornoch and – most exciting of all – Findhorn. What a name for a river! It sounds like something mythical out of an Alan Garner book but is actually a sandy river estuary surrounded by woods with a famously difficult and shallow shifting sand bar, and is home to the Royal Findhorn Yacht Club, which has one of the few remaining fleets of National 18s, large and totally outdated dinghies which my parents used to sail before they were outdated, hence my familiarity with it. I imagined it as the Aldeburgh of Scotland, which is one of the highest compliments I can pay a river, and for all these reasons it was top of my list. Sadly I am still imagining: I have, as it were, pressed my nose up against its window, peered at the delights within, and moved on. Why? My old friends wind and tide.
You’ll have read that I had already lost a day stuck in Wick, then spent two days in Helmsdale rather than one because Lybster is a tiny stone harbour which is fraught to enter in a flat calm and frankly dangerous in a big southerly, which is what was forecast, so I went past it to Helmsdale to walk and eat ice cream and fish and chips unadventurously instead. Never mind, the plan was to head on to Dornoch and Nairn, Lossiemouth and finally Findhorn before heading up to Inverness via the Cromarty Firth. Then I looked at the forecast for the rest of the week and it had done its usual trick of waiting for me to make a plan and then scuppering it: it was now going to blow quite, perhaps very, hard from the Southwest most days for the foreseeable future. Everywhere I was going was to the Southwest, so I would have to pick my route carefully, and I wouldn’t be wanting to hang around outside shallow harbours waiting for the tide to come in enough to creep over a sand bar if the wind was blowing Force 6 from any direction. So it was that I ended up spending the most unadventurous week in harbours which are shallow but hardly adventurous.
The sail to Lossiemouth was pure holiday – sun out, Force 2-4 breeze, and the legendary Moray Firth dolphins to play with. Legendary because apparently there are lots of them, and you can book boat trips from Inverness which are more or less guaranteed to see them.
Lossiemouth – or Lossie, as it’s universally known, but I felt I couldn’t call it that with my English accent – is yet another Telford off-the-peg harbour and village built by the town (city?) of Elgin, which is just up the river Lossie but too shallow for serious fishing boats. It has a nice enough holiday feel to it these days, in the absence of all but two fishing boats, and the harbour is now entirely filled with a very pleasant if rather shallow marina run, apparently single-handedly, by someone called Amanda.
I would say a couple of hours would do justice to Lossiemouth on a touring holiday, and that would include a long lunch in the very popular Harbour Lights café on the quay. A whole afternoon and a gale-bound day, without the long lunch, was going to be quite a challenge. The ladies in the fishing museum (a Moray Firth must-have) did their best by detaining me for what felt like hours in two rooms full of nets, explaining the difference between a Fifie, a Scaffie and a Zulu and, when they heard I was from Kent, engaging me on a detective mission to trace one of their family’s trawlers which was last seen in Faversham Creek.
There is nothing else to do in Lossiemouth except go to the beach, of which there are two excellent ones – the Moray coast is one huge beach after another – so I did: it was pleasantly warm and I took my laptop to write a blog post. This was a terrible mistake. I had never been on a Scottish beach before except by dinghy on the way to the pub. I was the only one in shorts and I soon found out why: it was blowing a near-gale and I was swept up in a kind of freezing sand-storm which no-one else seemed bothered by. I sat down in the lee of a sand dune which worked for about half an hour until it suddenly started raining very hard; I looked around and the beach was deserted. I struggled back to find everyone back in town eating ice cream in the relative warmth.
Getting back to the boat to shelter from what was now steady rain brought another disappointment: the wind was enjoying itself so much spoiling my week that it was going to blow hard again the next day. Disaster: I really didn’t fancy beating 20 miles into a Force 6 to try and find, then get over, the Findhorn bar, but I couldn’t face another day in Lossiemouth either, so I rolled the dice of desperation and decided to catch a bus to Elgin, another to Burghead and walk back along the Moray Coast Path.
This was also quite painful for a range of reasons: the first bus didn’t turn up (quite usual these days, the old lady I waited with explained) so I missed the connection to Burghead, when I did make it to Elgin bus station the next bus set off half an hour late and was driven by a terrifying driver who attempted to make up all the lost time on the ring road and consequently missed the turn-off, and the delays meant that on the walk back I got to a series of beach cafes a few miles apart where I had planned on buying lunch just as each one was closing, like traffic lights on the Marylebone Road.
However there were upsides: I got to see more of Elgin, which is a rather elegant town (city?) founded on fishing and whisky, but today made less elegant by huge numbers of people dressed mainly in body-hugging tin foil and waving rainbow flags. This wasn’t a good look for any of them, especially the pensioners in wheelchairs of which there were several. I don’t know why: they were all going to the global phenomenon that is the MacMoray Festival to see Status Quo and Bonnie Tyler, and there was no mention of a spray-on tin foil dress code.
It looked dreadful: there was a small funfair in a big field, and it was lashing down with rain. Perhaps the tin foil was an attempt at a fashionable survival blanket.
I also got to drive past Gordonstoun School on the speeding bus from hell, which was a surprise in that it isn’t, as King Charles would have us believe, in a rugged wilderness miles from anywhere where boys can be thrown into freezing mountain torrents before breakfast, it’s in the middle of entirely flat, lush fields a couple of miles down the road from the Starbucks and M&S Food Hall in Elgin.
I also got to explore the drying harbours of Burghead and Hopeman, which judging by the size and shallowness of them is probably better done on foot rather than even in a lift-keel yacht.
I also got to walk some of the surprisingly good Moray Coast path – I say surprising because in addition to wild and lovely beaches it has small cliffs with great views, from which I could see the yacht I had been next to last night battling into the really quite rough sea all of six miles to Hopeman, where they would be trapped until High Water the following afternoon, which confirmed my decision to stay put.
I also got to see the carcass of a beached whale, which was a first for me. Unfortunately I got to smell it too as I was downwind before I realised what it was.
What I didn’t get was any lunch: by the time I made it back to Lossiemouth even the improbably located Turkish patisserie had closed, so after all that anticipation of beach food it was a pork pie from the Co-op. Never mind, there was Findhorn to look forward to. Perhaps the Royal Findhorn YC would welcome me in to a National 18 supper.
Not so: the pork pie was not as disappointing as the new forecast: although the next day would be calm it was now promising bigger wind on Monday, which was when I was due into the Caledonian Canal at Inverness. If I went to Findhorn I would be coming out over the shallow bar into this wind, I would have to wait until it was absolutely High Water to be safe, and consequently fight the tide and wind up to Inverness. Findhorn binned, I would have to go to Cromarty instead. At least it is supposed to be pretty,, and much closer to Inverness for the final windy leg.
Sunday morning was as calm and unadventurous as possible – blazing sunshine, gentle breeze. I felt a bit of a fraud tacking gently past Hopeman and Burghead where I’d seen the others bashing bravely into waves yesterday. The wind died completely and as I was in no hurry I motored up to the Findhorn entrance: the river looked even prettier than described, and in the sunshine the beaches and woods around it looked idyllic. There were people out walking and I could hear the sound of happy Sunday morning conversations but it was low tide and the buoys marking the channel – much easier to spot than I was expecting – were sitting on the sand bar high and dry. There was a large seal colony basking on the sand, and two paddleboarders who waved cheerily. In another display of seal sinisterness, two of them had clearly been detailed off to follow the paddleboarders, only a couple of metres behind. It all looked a bit threatening to me: I would worry that I would fall off and find myself face to face with a territorial seal.
As if peering at Findhorn without visiting it was not bad enough, the weather had a final trick up its sleeve. Monday’s forecast had got worse: gale force gusts and thunderstorms, from the exact direction I would be heading from Cromarty to Inverness, against the tide, in the morning, in contrast to the sunshine, flat calm and favourable tide I was now enjoying. It was a depressing no-brainer: Inverness Marina is totally sheltered and all of a mile from the canal entrance. I could do that safely in a hurricane, A quick call to the marina and I was booked in.
And so I spent my last night on the Moray Firth in a very comfortable and safe marina, which just happens to be on the edge of an industrial estate on the edge of a town I have visited enough, underneath a suspension bridge carrying the very noisy main road north.
Holiday? No. Adventure? No. But when next morning I nipped up to the canal in 20 mintes between thundery downpours and gale force squalls, I was happy it was neither – it was just typical cruising sailing.
Blue Moon's trip around the UK 
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