Towards the end of August Jo and I took the sleeper train from Euston to Fort William and then another train to Mallaig. Goldfinch was waiting in Mallaig, and we paid a brief visit to her; but for the first half of the week we had plans that didn't involve sailing. Just a few days earlier we had celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary, and we were now re-visiting the place where we spent part of our honeymoon - Doune, on the Knoydart Peninsula. It's not far from Mallaig, but almost the only way of getting there is by boat; the people that run it come and pick guests up in their motor launch and ferry them over there. In a way, this return to Doune was the spark that ignited the whole idea of sailing round Britain: I thought it would be nice to take Goldfinch there, and having looked at the map I realised that it's almost diametrically opposite Ipswich, so if we went up one way and came down the other that would be a circumnavigation.
We had a delightful few days in Doune. When we arrived it was pouring with rain, but the rest of our time there was bathed in sunshine. There was great scenery, beautiful walking, good company and fantastic food. On the Monday evening, Goldfinch arrived with Bryan, Debbie, Mike and Chris aboard; we all had dinner together and the following day Jo and I went aboard and we all sailed off together.
With the weather still fair, and the wind still entirely absent, Goldfinch rounded Ardnamurchan Point. In an earlier post I recounted how we mistakenly awarded ourselves a sprig of heather after passing Cape Wrath, only to discover that only vessels that have passed Ardnamurchan can wear that particular badge of honour. We'd kept the sprig, safely perched in a whisky tasting glass from Wick, so as we rounded the point we retrieved the heather and fastened it, legitimately, to the bow.
This is yet another headland with a fierce reputation, but once again on the day we passed it the weather was sunny, the sea was flat and the sky was blue. Ardamurchan is in fact the western-most point of mainland Britain, which means that Goldfinch has now ticked off three of the four extremities of the island: Lowestoft (east), Dunnet Head (north - though we were way to the north of this when we were in Orkney), and Ardnamurchan (west). Only the most southerly point (the Lizard in Cornwall) remains to be conquered, which will be in the second of my Two Summers, next year (though I have sailed Goldfinch past that one before, some years ago).
Later that day we arrived at Tobermory, on the Isle of Mull. To people my age, that name recalls the Wombles; and for a younger generation, the brightly-painted buildings along the front are the setting for the fictional Balamory. I have been here before, but the last time was almost thirty years ago, and much has changed - most notably, there is now a fair-sized marina here. That evening, we found a decent Indian restaurant and enjoyed its wares.
The following day we doubled back round the north-west corner of Mull and headed south. On the way we passed the tiny island of Staffa, famous for Fingal's Cave, with its impressive basalt columns, similar in appearance to the Giant's Causeway in Ireland. According to legend, the giant Fionn mac Cumhaill (anglicised as Fin MacCool) built the Causeway to help him meet and fight another giant. 'Fingal' is another version of Fin MacCool, made popular by James MacPherson. The composer Felix Mendelssohn visited Staffa in 1829 and it inspired him to write his 'Hebrides Overture', which has the subtitle 'Fingal's Cave'. As we sailed past we intended to play this music at full blast, but we had a technical issue with the mp3 file which prevented this, so we were forced to sing it instead ('Boom-boom diddy boom-boom'). We had had a notion that we might go into the cave in our dinghy, but the wind was picking up by now, and the surge into the cave made this impossible, so we contented ourselves with sailing slowly past.
On the southern edge of Mull is a long peninsula reaching out westwards, and just off the end of this peninsula is the island of Iona, the site of a historic Abbey founded by St Columba in 563 AD, which is now home to a religious community founded in 1938. Columba's name means 'dove', and its various Celtic forms have given rise to a number of names including Colm, Malcolm, and Callum. It was on Iona that the Book of Kells was produced - a stunningly beautiful illuminated manuscript that is now in Trinity College, Dublin.
We arrived about lunchtime and dropped the anchor. The wind had become quite brisk by now, and as we ate our sandwiches we noticed two things. The first was that to get ashore we would have to take our little inflatable dinghy across some quite boisterous waves. And the second was that our anchor wasn't holding properly, and we were gradually drifting downwind. So we decided to find a more secure and sheltered anchorage for the night, and come back in the morning when hopefully it would be calmer. Across the way from Iona is a place called Bull Hole where we found a suitable place to drop the hook, and we spent a peaceful night there.
The next day, thankfully, the wind was much lighter, and we managed to anchor securely and go ashore in the dinghy.
The medieval monks who lived on Iona believed it was a 'thin place', where the boundary between Heaven and Earth was easily crossed. When I first visited, nearly forty years ago, I remember getting some appreciation of this idea: something about the landscape and the distance from everyday hubbub made an impression on my youthful imagination. I confess that this time I didn't get it: yes, it's beautiful and peaceful, but it didn't feel any more 'spiritual' to me than the other islands we have visited. Still, the Abbey is interesting and has a certain robust elegance to it.
After our visit to the island we started out for Oban. Or at least we tried to. The first job was to get the anchor up, and we discovered that it was holding so well we couldn't pull it up. It soon became clear that it had hooked itself under a big underwater cable. These are marked on the chart so you can avoid this very situation, but we seemed to have snagged on one that was not in its proper place.
We tried various manoeuvres, back and forth and round and round, but the anchor kept a firm hold on the cable. The classic solution to this problem is to support the cable with a rope so you can lower the anchor and thereby free it. Sometimes you can pull the anchor up enough to be able to reach the cable, but this one wasn't budging more than a few inches. So we devised a cunning plan.
We have a device called the Buoy Friend, which is a gadget that makes it easier to loop a rope through a ring on the top of a mooring buoy. By taping this to a boat-hook we managed to extend its reach to something like three metres - about the depth of the water. Mike put on his swimming gear and a pair of goggles and lay face-down in the dinghy, trying to catch the cable with this improvised apparatus. At full reach and with a bit of tide running it proved very difficult, and when he finally managed to hook the cable he found that the jaws of the Buoy Friend were not quite wide enough, so it didn't work. All this time the tide had been ebbing, so the water was getting shallower. In the end Mike decided to take a deep breath and pull himself down the anchor chain, where he managed to loop the rope under the cable. Not for the first time, Mike saved the day. It was now an easy matter to take the weight of the cable on the rope, lower the anchor and free ourselves. We were on our way.
That night we anchored in Loch Spelve, a delightful place with a narrow entrance that can kick up a bit of a fuss when the tide meets the wind; fortunately the wind was gentle that day, but even so we could see some confused and disturbed patterns in the water as the various currents and eddies vied with each other. Once past the entrance, the loch widens out and becomes more placid, and we had another peaceful night.
Oban was our next destination, where Jo and I were to leave the boat. It is a busy port with much coming and going of ferries. The small marina is a recent development that has taken some business away from the one on the island of Kerrera, just across the water from Oban; the latter, being on the mainland, is more convenient for crew arriving or departing.
The next morning we were woken by a booming foghorn as a ferry departed. The fog was thick, and even though the sun was trying to come out, it never really cleared up. Jo and I went to the station to begin our journey home, and the others set out in the afternoon, hopeful that the visibility would improve. It didn't, but they reached Crinan safely and over the next few days passed through the Crinan Canal and proceeded to Largs Yacht Haven, where Goldfinch is now safely out of the water with her mast down. This will be her home now till the Two Summers adventure re-starts in May 2022.
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