13 June 2021
When we came back to the boat in mid June, after a couple of weeks at home, Peterhead had been transformed. Last time we had been here, at the end of May, it was grey, foggy, dismal. Now the sun was shining, the sky was blue, and suddenly the grim forbidding fishing town acquired a certain sturdy beauty. The Wetherspoons was still there, and we made use of its bounty more than once before setting sail.
Having arrived on Saturday and re-stocked the galley, we left on Sunday morning. This was going to be a long passage - not quite as long as Wells to Whitby, but a solid 70 miles that could take up to fourteen hours, depending on the conditions.
Only about half an hour outside the harbour, there was enough wind to sail by, so we cut the engine and started enjoying it. The direction of the wind was just right, and it was mostly a Force 4 - the perfect wind which will get the boat moving briskly without being too challenging.
It stayed more or less like that for several hours. Occasionally the breeze died and we had to motor, but it would always come back soon after that. From time to time someone would say something ill-omened, like 'This is great!' or 'It's almost too good to be true!' We should have scratched a backstay, or done some other maritime ritual, to ward off the bad luck; but that's just superstition, so we joked about it instead and just went back to enjoying a great day's sailing.
Suddenly Joe saw something: a sleek black back with a dorsal fin, breaking the surface of the water. I looked but saw nothing: the creature had dived. Shortly afterwards it surfaced again and this time I saw it. It teased us for some while, arching its black and white body out of the waves in a different place each time, sometimes on one side of the boat, sometimes on the other. Occasionally we could hear the strong exhalation from its blowhole as it surfaced. Surely this was an orca? Later I did a bit of Googling, and decided that it was probably a female, as its dorsal fin was not the towering structure sported by the males. It's even possible it was one of the smaller whales, but it was definitely too big to be a dolphin. It made our day. Things were now, more than ever, too good to be true.
And too good to last. Early in the afternoon, as we were approaching a large wind farm in the Moray Firth, the wind stopped. And then it started again, quite strongly. Very strongly. And with the wind came the waves, beam-on to the boat, capped with white spray. This made the boat roll with the most uncomfortable motion. Perhaps we could have sailed - the angle of the wind was about right - but we also developed a problem with unfurling the headsail, and couldn't get the boat moving at a decent speed, so we kept on motoring.
Having had several hours of delight, we were now treated to some hours of wearisome, uncomfortable, energy-sapping progress. There were no ports of refuge, no plan B to fall back on, because the nearest harbour was Wick, our intended destination. So we plugged on, till the memory of the morning's pleasures was all but obliterated.
Finally, around 7pm, over twelve hours after our departure from Peterhead, we reached Wick. This harbour was built by people who understood the kind of weather that gets dealt out here: it has some strong solid stone walls arranged in such a way as to cancel out all of the vicious swell, and much of the wind too. Inside the marina, it was calm and comfortable.
That night we dined on board and drank rather more red wine than we really meant to.
Truly a day of contrasts.
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