Circumnavigation of The British Isles 2011: RR3 Scotland

We are now in Lerwick, the capital of the Shetland Isles. They are the most northerly islands in the UK.

We worked our way up the west coast of Scotland from Coleraine on the north coast of Ulster. Compared to the gales and challenging conditions we experienced sailing up the rugged west coast of Ireland, the sail north through the Scottish isles has been a ‘pleasure cruise’. The weather has been warm and sunny, the wind manageable and, being inside the islands, there has been no Atlantic swell. Perfect sailing conditions. Since the visibility has also been excellent we’ve been able to fully appreciate the beauty and grandeur of the Scottish coast. We even had good weather on our passage north via Fair Isle to the Shetlands.

Initially, our day sail across the North Channel from Coleraine to Port Ellen on Islay, our first port of call in Scotland, was interesting. Forty miles with a cross tide of up to 6 knots meant we had to aim off by 30 degrees in order to arrive at our intended destination. Shallow patches in the channel combined with a strong tide and a brisk wind created overfalls and small whirlpools that made the trip invigorating.

Islay is an island steeped in history – and whisky! Generations of conquerors and settlers have left their mark. From the Iron Age, through the Vikings, the Lord of the Isles, the feuding clans, and the Clearances down to the two World Wars. All this can be traced on the ground in the shape of standing stones, forts and castles from pre-history, to the medieval ruined chapels, deserted villages and monuments. Today the island boasts its own malting plant and eight distilleries – the most concentrated area for whisky production in Scotland. The southern distilleries – Ardbeg, Lagavulin and Laphroaig – produce a smoky peaty whisky by using the local peaty water and by cold smoking the malted barley over damp salt- and seaweed-laden peat. The northern distilleries, including Bowmore and Caol Ila, produce lighter whiskies from clear spring water and unsmoked barley.

We visited Laphroaig where we joined a group of eleven whisky enthusiasts who had flown in from Sydney, Australia for a 10-day tour of the Scottish distilleries. They had already visited two that day and were clearly enthusiastic and knowledgeable – asking intelligent questions and taking copious notes and photographs. We concentrated on the liberally dispensed samples! Eschewing the 25-year-old vintage at £225 a bottle, we bought an 18-year-old ‘Ileach’ (meaning friendship) edition. It is significantly better than the ten-year-old malt we can buy at home.

From our anchorage in the south east of Islay we sailed up the coast to the Craighouse anchorage on Jura. The island’s distillery is right on the shore and provides visitor’s buoys and pontoons. Not surprisingly it is well patronised by yachties.

From Jura we sailed north to Ardfern at the head of Loch Craignish, just before the Sound of Luing and well clear of the notorious Corryvreckan whirlpools. We initially moored on a free buoy in a beautiful lagoon just short of Ardfern marina. Subsequently, we moved on a mile or so to the boatyard’s pontoons where we met up with Jean Francois, our French friend who had been travelling north more or less with us since the Scilly Islands. Loch Craignish, incidentally, is where the speedboat chase in From Russia With Love was filmed.

We had been told that the Ardfern Yacht Centre and chandlery are the best on the west coast of Scotland – one of the reasons for visiting. The main reason for our visit, however, was because we had had some important spare parts couriered to Hew and Barbara Service, friends of my childhood friend Shelagh Forbes. They own a goose and sheep farm and run an upmarket guesthouse near Ardfern overlooking the lagoon where we spent our first night. A splendid location with magnificent views over the loch and surrounding mountains. They kindly invited us to join them for a superb dinner with Cathy and Peter Wright, a couple staying in one of their B&B suites on the farm. During the evening we learnt that the autumnal hues on the trees and shrubs, which we had so admired on the sail north, were due to wind burn from the storm in May. Hew and Barbara were concerned that permanent damage may have been caused. At 11.30 p.m., when Hew drove us back to the marina, it was still light.

We left Ardfern early next morning in order to catch the tide north through the 25-mile tidal race which includes Dorus Mor and the Sound of Luing. The tide can run at nearly double our boat speed in those sounds and we could have gone backwards had we got the timings wrong. We arrived in Oban in good time to meet up with Ian Ross, a friend from Oxford who was just finishing a sailing course with a local school. Ian and his wife Ginny sailed with us in Island Drifter in the Caribbean and have also brought their Wayfarer to and sailed with us at Calshot.

Oban is a large well-protected natural harbour. Even so, eighteen boats broke free of their moorings during ‘The Storm’ in May (when we were storm bound in Ireland). Three yachts can still be seen perched on the rocks. The town is constructed of their famous grey slate, enlivened by a large colourful fishing fleet and the ubiquitous red and black Caledonian McBrayne ferries. Stalls on the dock sell superb quality wet and shellfish directly off the fishing fleet. We visited the Oban distillery, which is located near the waterfront. During the tasting session we found that we particularly liked their double-matured 15-year-old whisky so of course we had to add a bottle to our collection. This whisky is first left to age in American bourbon casks before it is transferred to mature for a final year in old sherry casks, picking up complementary flavours from both.

Oliver Rofix in his self-built 18ft yacht Jolly Olly came into the marina soon after us, flying a ‘Support Cancer Research’ banner. He had been at the London Boat Show in January and hoped to get back in time for the Southampton Boat Show in September. He is five years on from a bone-marrow transplant to treat leukaemia and is sailing round Great Britain to raise awareness of and funds for the Anthony Nolan Trust. We were pleased to contribute to his cause.

Tobermory, our next stop, is a very popular picture-postcard harbour, which we last called in at twelve years ago on a delivery trip from Norway to Dublin. This time we came to visit Geoff and Chris Reade’s farm where they produce Isle of Mull cheeses from unpasteurised milk from their own farm. The cows’ diet is supplemented with draff – expended barley from the local distillery. No wonder the cheese tastes so good and the cows look so contented. We met Geoff ten years ago when he came to Ipswich to collect his brother Eric from his yacht. We had befriended Eric when he was dying from a chronic lung disease and we subsequently helped Geoff sort out Eric’s boat and affairs.

We decided to give Skye a miss since we had been there before by road – and you can’t do everything. Instead we headed the 80 miles north west across the Sea of Hebrides and the Minches to the Outer Hebrides – or the Western Isles as they are referred to there. The chain of islands stretches for 120 miles, runs due north to south and is 40 miles off the Scottish mainland. In the event, two thirds of our passage was parallel to Skye’s beautiful coast. En route we passed The Small Isles – Eigg, Rum, Muck and Canna – and had an outstanding view of the Cuillin Mountains. As we sailed by we drank a toast to Matt Elliott, a family friend, who fell there in 2009.

That evening we surfed into Lochmaddy in North Uist before reaching calmer waters and mooring on one of the blue Highland & Islands visitors buoys in the protected anchorage beside the small ferry terminal. Calmac, the ferry owners, kindly provide free WiFi. Next day we rowed the 50 metres ashore and hired a very old car from a local for ‘cash’ and no paperwork. When asked, he replied, ‘Och, you don’t need to worry about insurance here.’

The south half of the Outer Hebrides chain, which is separated from the north half by the Sound of Harris, comprises four islands, each linked by a single track road and causeway – with a formal Otter Crossing road sign on each. The small island of Barra to the south has a regular ferry service and an airport with a runway on a cockleshell beach, useable only at low tide.

The scenery varies: freshwater lochs and peat bogs in the north, mountains in the south, superb white sand beaches along the west coast, and long deep lochs on the east. Beautifully maintained houses are scattered around as if they’ve been thrown down like dice. Wild flowers, one of the major tourist attractions, carpet huge swathes of land with drifts of yellow, pink and white.

During our day’s drive we visited the islands’ Hebridean Smoke House and purchased a good range of products – the smoked trout being particularly delicious. We also visited the Kallin scallop-processing plant. The buildings appear to sit on a pink mountain of discarded shells, through which gulls root for scraps, causing a continuous clatter as they do so. The wreck of the SS Politician is nearby at the south of Eriksay. This true event was the inspiration for Compton McKenzie’s book Whisky Galore and the subsequent film.

We’d hoped to get to St Kilda, forty miles west of the Outer Hebrides, but the weather forecast wasn’t favourable. We wouldn’t have been able to leave the boat at anchor and go ashore, so reluctantly had to give it a miss.

Stornoway in Lewis, at the northern end of the Hebridean chain, our next stop, is a large natural harbour tucked behind the Eye peninsula. On the way we passed the uninhabited Shiant Islands, a major breeding ground for seabirds. Stornoway is the only town in the whole of the Hebrides and is the administrative centre and a major fishing and ferry port. We met up again with Jean Francois who had meanwhile been exploring Skye. The fish docks have a cooperative landing stage, market and smokehouse and the town has many Gaelic art venues, Hebridean jewellery shops and, of course, several Harris tweed outlets – including Ronnie’s, a musty old place crammed full of cloth, woollens, hats, old rusting looms, typewriters and furniture. Jean Francois bought himself a hand-knitted hat that could have stopped a bullet at twenty paces! We also visited an exhibition of the Lewis Chessmen in the Stornoway Museum. These extraordinary chess pieces carved from whalebone were discovered buried on a beach on the west coast of Lewis in the nineteenth century and are believed to have belonged to a Norwegian king in the twelfth century.

We shared a car (this time with insurance) with Jean Francois to tour the island. On the way out of town we stopped at Charles Macleod’s award-winning butcher’s shop to buy their famous black pudding and Scotch meat pies, before continuing to the lighthouse at the Butt of Lewis. This was once included in the Guinness Book of Records as being the ‘windiest place in the British Isles’ – and we now know why. The Lewis landscape is dominated by peat bogs where ridges and rectangles show old peat diggings, with fresh black scars showing where a dig is current. In contrast, Harris, to the south, is very mountainous with deeply indented sea lochs on either coast. There we visited the Callinish Standing Stones – a Scottish version of Stonehenge. Nearby we were fortunate to find a small croft where the weaver was happy to allow us to watch cloth being woven on an old treadle Hattersleigh single-width loom – made originally (but no longer) in Keighley in Yorkshire. I bought a length to make a jacket. For lunch we treated ourselves to fresh local herring, fried in oatmeal, at one of the few pubs on the island.

Another friend of a friend, James Morrison, accompanied by his girlfriend Franzi, joined us for a wee dram that evening. To our surprise (and delight) he turned out to be an IT specialist at the local college and in five seconds flat sorted out the problem I’d been having with the link between the satellite phone and the new laptop. We can now get, in isolated places where there is no 3G signal, more detailed weather information from the internet than it is possible to obtain from Navtex or SSB radio. (We have yet to prove that this system will work any better offshore than the Mail-A-Sail software we discarded after our Atlantic Circuit.)

Jean Francois headed south from Stornoway which was the furthest north he had planned to go. His ultimate destination is his home port of Quiberon in Brittany. We were very sorry to part company with him. We headed north east on an overnight sail to Fair Isle, passing by Cape Wrath and the Orkneys. A night watch is a doddle when it doesn’t get dark! We finally crept through the narrow rocky entrance into North Haven, a beautiful little sheltered harbour (except in northerly winds) where yachts are allowed to tie up against the wall in front of the ferry.

The weather during our stay in Fair Isle was simply magnificent. It was a real pleasure to spend a day walking around the island in balmy conditions – not usually the case, we were informed. Fair Isle is owned by the National Trust of Scotland, from whom the seventy islanders lease their traditional crofts in the more fertile bottom two thirds of the island. Putative incomers to the community have to undergo a selection process conducted by the Trust and a committee of residents. The northern third of the island is rough grazing and moorland. Most of the coast is made up of impressive cliffs, every nook and cranny being inhabited by seabird breeding colonies. Fair Isle’s Bird Observatory has long been renowned for its research on bird migration. Lying on the intersection of major flight paths from Scandinavia, Iceland and the Faroes, it is famous for both the number of birds and the rarity of some species that pass by. Whenever a rare migrant is sighted, a ranger in a Land Rover tours the island flying a red flag and offering a free lift to anyone wishing to see the bird. We visited a croft where Fair Isle knitwear was on display. Demand now far exceeds supply and the prices are somewhat eye-watering, so we did not purchase anything.

By chance, the Observatory were holding their annual cocktail party for the islanders, this year in aid of the Tall Ships Race which is calling in during July. As one of the three visiting yacht crews in the harbour we were invited to join the party and had a great evening talking to some of the islanders and twitchers staying at the Observatory’s newly built accommodation (£50 per night full board – and you don’t have to be a Twitcher to stay there).

The plan now is to explore the Shetlands. Our final RR will be sent when we return to Ipswich.