My neighbours and dear friends Alex and David had a booking on the sleeper to Inverness, arriving on 12 June. So whatever happened I would always have had to wait for them somewhere. On balance, and despite occasional restlessness, I couldn't have picked a better spot than Whitehills, as described in the previous post.
Granted it didn't have big shops, but over the course of my stay I had two expensive Amazon deliveries. Sam's lovely Steiner binoculars broke apart in the middle a couple of years ago, were superglued together, and during the crashing around in the North Sea they broke again. I bought a much cheaper Aomekie pair (but still not actually cheap) from Amazon as a temporary expedient. They appeared one afternoon in the restroom attached to the marina toilet block. And I also realised that Sam's iPad, which I brought mainly to use the Antares charts of western Scotland, was slow to charge and also not really holding charge for long. It seems that it is around 13 years old! So I bought a new basic iPad, again from Amazon for speed of delivery. This time I got a bit nervous about a delivery to the marina so I arranged to collect it from the Morrisons in Banff.
On Wednesday 12th the westerly winds finally started to ease. I contemplated sailing to Lossiemouth on my own but was put off by forecasts of 1.5m swell (and still a headwind, just less of one). Chris and Julie set off on Olivia, but I gathered later that they didn't really enjoy the journey. Meanwhile Alex & David got the train to Elgin and a taxi to Whitehills, and arrived just before lunch, which gave me time to dig out the folding bike and cycle into Banff to collect my iPad and go to Tesco in the morning. Of course I overloaded the bike (and me) and didn't take enough bungee cords to tie on the big shopping bag. But with considerable effort I did eventually manage to wobble back to Whitehills with my huge load and tidy up some of it before the crew arrived. I had also paid Bertie's embarrassingly tiny bill (£120 for 11 nights!) and he filled two cans with diesel for me at £1.10 a litre.
It was great to welcome my old friends and enjoy a fish and chip supper on board. I broke it to them that we were heading off at 4am the next day, but apparently they had already realised this was likely. Overnight the world changed. No swell, no wind, no squeaking from ropes and fenders and we threaded our way out of the tight berth at 0415 into a sea with almost no waves, although still considerable swell. The sun had already risen and eventually it emerged from cloud and started making us warm! (Well, by Scottish standards). Initially the E wind was so light that putting the sail up would have rust resulted in constant banging, if not jibes, but by1000, as we passed Lossiemouth and the swell started to ease, we put up the main. We enjoyed a warming bowl of crossing stew (see previous posts) for lunch, and then as we passed Findhorn we got the jib up, the tide had turned in our favour and we sailed for a delightful couple of hours.
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| Lossie! |
There were two main reasons for heading off so early. One was that further east, ie at Whitehills, the easterlies were due to strengthen to a F5 or more, and I didn't want to inflict that on Alex and David on our first day. The other was to take a rising tide into Inverness, which is a tidal funnel where trying to go the other way from the tide may result in staying still. It's also quite shallow. So as we sailed speedily to the west of the Moray Firth I started to feel like as though we were surfing into a narrower and narrower gap - which was true, of course. At one point it looked as though the winds were strengthening, although they never got above 14 knots, and also that we might be at risk of a jibe, but there was sufficient north in the wind to prevent that. But as we approached Fortrose, where there is a very tidal, very narrow dogleg past a famous dolphin-watching spot, we furled the jib to improve visibility, then dropped the main to prevent jibes. There were dolphins, very close to the shore, but I was concentrating rather hard on helming and I only saw a fin or two.
Finally we approached the Kessock road bridge around 1600, and I radio'd Clachnaharry Sea Lock to see if there was any chance of getting into the Caledonian Canal that night. Amazingly, there was. We locked in, waited a while for the rail bridge and second lock to open, and finally tied up in Seaport Marina around 1800. We were absolutely delighted to be there but astonishingly knackered. After a G&T and a much bigger bowl of crossing stew™ I was in bed by 2100 and slept almost entirely solidly until 0715 the next morning.
Distance run: 61 miles
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