Believe it or not, there is more to this blog business than meets the reader’s eye, especially if I am to maintain its multi-award-winning status. Finding the time is the key thing, although the further north I go the more chance there is of being stuck in a harbour whilst gales and rain roar overhead (today is a case in point: I am in the library in Kirkwall – bless public libraries! Keep them open!). Wrestling with WordPress’ arcane ways is another: especially its total absence of spell checking, which leaves me terrified that I will make a typo and my erudite readership will think I have made a grammatical or spelling howler (can you believe the spell checker only works when you have published a post? So I have to go in straight away and spot the typos before you do). But one of the trickiest things is balancing the demand for ever more entertaining episodes with the reality of what has happened, particularly when that reality involves having your friends on board. I am supposed to keep them safe and happy, which tends not to be that entertaining, and do I really want to risk upsetting one friend by describing their antics for the entertainment of the others? I suspect (hope) that any willing guest has accepted that stepping on board Blue Moon does mean the probability of them appearing in print, but does that extend to me visiting them? How would I feel if I invited someone for the weekend and they went straight home and wrote a blog about it?
My visit to Kinlochbervie presented this challenge in its ultimate form: I was made very welcome not only by the folk of KLB but specifically by Rosalind and Jamie, but I was most definitely their guest, so I need to be very careful and not spend a huge amount of time detailing their hospitality because that feels like crossing a line. Luckily the only truly entertaining mishap was me ending up foot-first in a proper bog, and that was entirely my fault, so I should be OK.
Jamie’s arrival from Inverness was an excuse for more tea, but also another piece of shellfish generosity (I’m trying to think of a good pun around unshellfishness but it’s not really working). The fisherman who’d taken my lines on the first day, and whom Rosalind and Jamie instantly identified as Willie, had left a big box of langoustines snapping in the water and invited the yachts to help themselves. The Americans had succumbed to harbour rot and booked dinner in a restaurant up the coast (we think they meant down the coast or they will have been really disappointed) so more or less begged us to take them for fear of causing offence. We happily obliged, and my now well-honed crustacean despatching skills were brought into play in Rosalind’s kitchen. Even between the three of us we couldn’t eat them all.
In attempt to walk off a kilo of langoustines, a monkfish curry and a lot of cheese, Jamie proposed a short hike to a bothy in the wilderness the next day. After my exertions on the mountain I liked the word ‘short’, along with a promise that there would be no bog since my cheap Mountain Warehouse boots were showing their cheapness by splitting, so off we set. There was a path of sorts, but it was nice to have someone on hand who’d been walking here since a young age because most of the time it was completely invisible to the visitor’s eye. Miraculously we avoided what was very obviously bog all around, made it past a loch in the middle of nowhere, which I was assured was teeming with fish, into a vast valley where there was apparently absolutely nothing but mountains and rivers.
But the local knowledge knew better: there was a really rather rickety bridge across the river…
…and on the other side, nestled against the side of the mountain, a very remote bothy. I know, the whole point of bothies is to be remote, but this really did feel like it was miles from anywhere and it was. Yet again the rain did that inexplicable thing of waiting until we’d arrived before unleashing a brief downpour, so we were very grateful to the Mountain Bothy Association, although I’m sure they don’t see their purpose as providing shelter from the rain for passing yachtsmen. They’d be even more appalled that instead of hunkering down for the night on a wooden pallet, we waited for the sun to come out and took their chairs outside to lounge on what bothy folk probably don’t refer to as the patio while eating our sandwiches.
Sufficiently chuffed with the day’s progress we decided on a whim not to return on the sensible path but to walk down the totally trackless river valley to the famous Sandwood Bay which we could see about three miles away in the distance. This is where things got a bit more challenging: back across the bridge, as soon as we strayed off the path that Jamie knew we were into bog country and it got progressively wetter. I tested his theory about which bits were most likely to be proper bog and he was right – I went in up to my knee in stinking peaty wetness. There is an argument that doing this as soon as possible means that you can relax for the rest of the day knowing it can’t get any worse, but I don’t subscribe to that argument: it was wet and squelchy in one boot for the next four hours.
Next challenge was finding our way across some near-vertical cliffs next to the inland Sandwood Loch but the end was in sight: literally, as we could now see the beach.
Around the corner though, the hitherto unseen challenge: a ravine far too deep to cross, the kind that you can only spot on the OS map when you already know it’s there (full disclosure – I only scraped Geography O-level).
It was spectacular to look at, but added a good mile of scrambling to the journey, so that it was gone tea-time by the time we made it to the beach. Unsurprisingly, there were only four or five people there which isn’t too many when the beach is two miles long, but we did feel smug knowing that we’d come by bog and cliff while the others had ‘only’ walked the four miles from the car park.
Getting back at 6.30 meant that we had spent the best part of eight hours walking just over ten miles, but that just shows what hard work it was. That and the lounging around lunching at the bothy.
After two days of walking some sitting down on a boat was called for, so the three of us set off next for Handa, an island just south of Kinlochbervie which is a wildlife sanctuary full of nesting birds at this time of year. Jamie, of course, is a very keen follower of birds (I am loath to use a technical term in case it is the wrong one: he is absolutely not, for instance, a Twitcher) and I was hoping to learn a bit.
I’d skillfully arranged for the wind and rain to stop the moment we’d finished our coffee, so it was a gentle motor out to Handa and the calm sea meant that we could get very close to the cliffs which were covered with and surrounded by huge flocks of birds. All of these Jamie could name, few of the names I can remember but they all sounded good.
Lunch anchored in a tiny cove which I forgot to photograph, looking at the hordes of people on the island being marshalled by rangers, and ferried to and fro in what looked like an unsuitable launch, confirmed that visiting Handa by yacht was not a bad move.
The only way to top off these experiences was to offer something Jamie had never done: sailing around Cape Wrath. I’d done this before (Over the top), motoring in a flat calm and knew this wasn’t the kind of offer to be made lightly, especially to a non-sailor, which was why he, and I suspect most of the inhabitants of Kinlochbervie, had never done it. A final piece of astonishing weather fortune: it was forecast to be an even flatter calm than last year, thereby maintaining my record of never having rounded Cape Wrath in more than five knots of wind. There was so little wind that we could motor in close to the cliffs where there were even more birds than on Handa, and absolutely no tourists at all because this part of the coast has no paths and no way of getting there other than walking ten miles from Sandwood.
We also got even more favourable tide close inshore, so we appreciated why the the Vikings called it The Corner: unlike any other headland I know of, you really do turn through 90 degrees so that in under five minutes we got our first glimpse of the North Coast…
…and lost sight of the West Coast, for the last time in my case.
This was another significant moment, and it was very good not just to share it with someone, but someone sufficiently knowledgeable and local to puncture any potential melancholy with invitations to admire various seabirds in action, to identify a range of beaches on which family picnics had been had, and even to peer at the UK mainland’s most northerly and surely most remote golf course in the distance. None of which photographed too well, sorry.
And so we arrived in Loch Eriboll, by arrangement but well ahead of schedule. When I had visited last year this felt like the most remote and wild anchorage on the scary North Coast, now it felt like a totally sensible and civilised destination since it was right next to the road and only an hour’s drive for Rosalind to come and pick Jamie up. This plan worked a treat as we blew up the dinghy and arrived at the side of the road a full 30 seconds after she had pulled up.
We said our farewells in the layby and I settled down to supper with the most spectacular sunset:
The forecast was set fair for a gentle sail or motor round to the now-familiar village of Scrabster, where I had already booked the car club car to drive to the very civilised Tesco in Thurso to do a big shop before the short hop up to Orkney the next day. I’d done this before last year so slept easy. What could possibly go wrong?
The short answer to that question is that I could accidentally turn off the track recorder half way through. The long answer comes next…
Blue Moon's trip around the UK 
Leave a reply to A Feisty Final Furlong – Blue Moon’s trip around the UK Cancel reply