A Gigantic Whinge on the Celtic Fringe
Martin Edge
Copyright Martin Edge 2012
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A Gigantic Whinge on the Celtic Fringe
A Total and Complete Circumnavigation of Ireland and Britain by the Slightly Truncated Irish Route
Zophiel’s Cruise in 2011
Martin Edge
This rubbish is dedicated to my uncle, John Edge, a Yachtmaster and sailor of 70 years experience, who read previous accounts of my voyages and actually claimed to enjoy them.
Table of Malcontents
The Front Line of the Celtic Fringe
Preface
This is the holiday journal of a floating, ranting wimp. It is the tale of that wimp’s progress round the seas of northern Europe.
In 2003 I bought a small and slightly scruffy yacht called ‘Zophiel’. Though rather small for long distance cruising, the cutter rigged Vancouver is a seaworthy heavyweight. The first one was designed for a couple of nutters who were emigrating from Canada to New Zealand and wanted to do it in a 27ft sailing boat. Other Vancouvers have crossed oceans and sailed round the world.
My ambitions are rather more modest. Actually that’s not true. I’d love to join the ranks of the fearless ocean navigators and sail round the world. But, as I’ve already mentioned, I’m a bit of a wimp.
So over the past few years I’ve spent summers cruising around parts of northern Europe from Zophiel’s base under the Forth Bridge near Edinburgh. Most of these journeys have been sailed solo but sometimes I’ve had a crew, particularly for the longer sea crossings. Again, I’m no Joshua Slocum.
‘A Gigantic Whinge on the Celtic Fringe’ is the third tale of these cruises. It describes my circumnavigation of Ireland in 2011.
Though I started out writing a straightforward description of the trip, the world is an extremely annoying place so, as usual, it ended up as an extended series of rants and ramblings. These are mostly about the condition of the lands of the UK and Ireland that are often, somewhat disparagingly, described as the ‘Celtic Fringe’.
So I hope this account of a sailing trip, as well as being reasonably entertaining, will give some pause for thought about a few issues, even though it’s just the ramblings of a holidaying wimp.
The Celtic Fringe Whinge is the follow-up to “Floating Low to Lofoten”, which describes Zophiel’s 2008 cruise north along the coast of Norway to north of the Arctic Circle. “Skagerrak and Back”, which described Zophiel’s 2007 North Sea circuit, was the first in the series.
Martin Edge
January 2012
A Preliminary Whinge
This year I decided to sail round Ireland. Most people say that the clockwise route is best, as you beat against the prevailing south-westerlies in the sheltered waters of the Irish Sea, running with the wind and constant ocean swell up the exposed Atlantic coast.
As usual I ended up going the wrong way by the perverse route, anticlockwise. There was a rationale. Going anticlockwise I had options when I reached the bottom of Ireland. I could return the easy way, up the Irish Sea. I could continue east and circumnavigate England via the wilds of the little frequented south coast and such remote and uncharted places as ‘The Solent’. I could continue south across Biscay to places where, it is rumoured, the sun comes out and temperatures soar above 12 degrees.
In the event I took the wimpy option and came back up the Irish Sea. This allowed me to visit a lot of the bits of what is sometimes called the ‘Celtic Fringe’. If you consider the south east of England to be the centre of something then the broadly speaking Celtic bits of the British Isles can be considered a ‘fringe’. The west of Scotland, Ireland - the Republic and the North, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany all lie on the edge of the Atlantic. From the perspective of someone travelling on a road or rail network they are remote from the ‘centre’ and hence on the ‘fringe’.
Once you start travelling independently by sea and are not constrained by ferry routes, you realise that the fragmented bits of this ‘Celtic Fringe’ are more or less contiguous. They form a connected whole.
This was what it was like for our ancestors, for whom the sea was not so much a barrier but the main highway, albeit a dangerous and fraught one. It was easier to travel long distances by sea than through the boggy, tangled undergrowth of most of England. The latter was an uninviting swamp on the fringe of the Celtic world. So whilst I was writing an account of a journey by sea I couldn’t resist sounding off about the Celtic lands and some of the issues facing them.
Being something of a self-publicist I made a small study of how high profile solo sailors make names for themselves. In many cases the answer seems to be shameless exaggeration. Recently an Australian girl claimed to be the youngest solo circumnavigator of the world by nipping round the Southern Ocean and making a quick detour over the equator just into the northern hemisphere. A remarkable feat way beyond the wildest dreams of most of us, but not, strictly speaking, a circumnavigation.
Somewhat lesser mortals routinely set out to circumnavigate Britain. It is quite shocking how many of these, including some I met this year on my travels, not only cut inside most of the islands on their journey, but actually sail right through the middle of Britain down the Caledonian Canal.
These don’t just include con artists like the bloke I saw motoring up the canal with his girlfriend as crew with the legend “Sailing Around Britain Single-Handed” emblazoned across his boat. When questioned he said, “Oh all that stuff to the north isn’t really Britain”. They also include very well known names like famously fearless sailor and professional crier-to-camera Ellen MacArthur.
It is quite astonishing how many highly accomplished, driven sailors, with obsessive personal goals, are happy to cheat as soon as the weather turns nasty, yet still proclaim their success as circumnavigators.
They mostly get away with it for two reasons. Firstly, a generation has now grown up which is used to the BBC weather map of the UK. This curious creation has been produced to ‘downsize’ Scotland and increase the apparent size of the south of England, by tilting the country up so that the north of Scotland all but disappears in the distance. So a generation of English people now believes that Scotland is about half the size it actually is. Secondly, they do it for charity, so that all but the most churlish (me) let them off with it.
If you Google MacArthur’s circumnavigation of Britain it’s actually quite hard to disentangle her route from the strident statements about her astonishing bravery. But yes, she, like many others, insultingly cocked a snook at highlanders, pretended they didn’t exist and happily sailed up the middle.
“Oh, I’d like to have sailed round the top via the Pentland Firth and Cape Wrath”, some of them say “But it was difficult and the weather turned nasty and I was behind schedule, so I sailed round Britain by the slightly shorter, lowland route”. To which I reply “I’d have liked to have sailed across the Southern Ocean and round Cape Horn, but it’s difficult and the weather turned nasty so I stayed at home in bed, but I’ll claim I did it anyway”.
Of course if you want to do a total circumnavigation of Britain and are a properly driven pedant, like one would have thought MacArthur to be, you’d want to go round all the islands. If you did then the southern half, from Fort Bill southwards, round the Scillies, along the south coast, up the east and round to Inverness, is a minimum of about 1260 miles. The northern half, out of Inverness, round Muckle Flugga, St Kilda and the outer Hebrides (we’ll let her off with Rockall, which remained disputed territory) and back to Fort Bill, is about 1000 miles.
One day I’m going to head from my base on the Forth, round the Pentland Firth and Cape Wrath, down to the Bristol Channel where I’ll get the mast taken down. I’ll head through the English canal system to the Thames then sail back up the east coast to the Forth. I will, of course, claim a circumnavigation of Britain and see whether there’s any objections from sailors in the south of England.
But in 2011 I took a leaf out of Ellen MacArthur’s book and lied through my teeth to try and get publicity. I’m even less principled than most, so I claimed a Total and Complete Circumnavigation of Ireland and Britain by the Slightly Truncated Irish Route.
Deliverance
Haar bloody haar. The sea fog on the east coast in the spring is no joke. April 2011 had seen the whole country broiling in an unprecedented heat wave. The whole of the UK, that is, except the sea off the east coast and the pontoons at my home marina, Port Edgar, just under the Forth road and rail bridges.
On a couple of occasions I'd driven down to the marina in the baking sun, parked the car in sunshine just beside the mud flats, put on a jumper as the temperature dropped 10 degrees on the way along the main pier and been plunged into freezing winter weather – thermals, woolly hat, gloves and all – as I approached the end of the pontoon.
It finally looked as if the haar - which is what folk in Scotland call this persistent east coast sea fog - might just clear on Saturday April 23rd, as the wind was predicted to go westerly. The timing of this weather window was a little unfortunate as I am a mean bastard and had paid the marina up to the end of the month. Was it worth risking the possibility of gales or more haar and getting my extra week? A friend at the marina, Ian Cameron, decided this for me. He and Peter Lindemann were planning to take Peter’s Sigma 36 ‘Solpieter’ round to the west coast to take part in some madness called the ‘Scottish Three Pekes Race’. Apparently Ian would be running up several mountains with a trio of lap dogs then sailing round the Mull of Kintyre against the tide in a gale. Rather them than me, but I thought I'd chum them along just for the delivery trip bit for the company.
Where to, I hadn’t really decided. Three years ago I'd announced that I was going to Norway. A friend asked me how far north I'd be going. “Oh I don't know, probably up to the Lofoten Islands” I replied casually. He seemed surprised and so was I when I saw just how sodding far up north they were. So this year I was making no commitments. When asked where I was going I just said “Anstruther, but I've got charts for as far as the Canaries”. Which was true. As well as a new bottom-of-the-range chartplotter I had bought a whole pile of second hand, cancelled paper charts. Nice large scale ones for Scotland – down to 1:15000 for the inner Forth, with the scale getting smaller and smaller with distance – round about 1:1,250,000 off the coast of Africa. I would probably have needed just as large scale charts for Africa, but this kind of geographical foreshortening with distance, where all the stuff nearby seems a lot bigger than the stuff a long way away, is I think quite common. It’s how the BBC get away with drawing Scotland as a pimple on the top of England.
The last time Ian Macaroon
Cameron was on my boat some idiot crashed into us and did £10,000
worth of damage, which isn’t much less than Zophiel is worth. The
last time I was on Ian's boat the keel fell off. So I was taking no
chances. If I was to go sailing with Ian it would be on separate
boats.
On the morning of April 23rd the forecast was for no more fog and gentle winds building from the south west. So early in the morning Zophiel, with my other half Anna and me on board, and Solpieter, with Ian Cameron and Pieter Lindemann, left Port Edgar motoring in, of course, a gentle easterly and thick fog. Staying out of the shipping lanes we picked our way down river. Zoph’s £100 AIS receiver linked to the chartplotter proved reassuring. We tracked a ship bound for the oil refinery up the Forth at Grangemouth coming in from the fairway buoy and passing us close by in the channel. The crew of Solpieter, on the other hand, without AIS, got a good fright as they suddenly heard a foghorn close by and saw a huge shape lumbering towards them out of the pea-souper.
The start wasn’t auspicious, but as we left the Forth and rounded Fife Ness the fog cleared, a breeze kicked in from the west and we sailed on a nice gentle reach to Arbroath. The downsides were that it remained cloudy and Solpieter beat us by hours, but that was the start of a near perfect delivery trip to the west coast and we didn’t see much in the way of adverse conditions at all for the next twelve days.
After a showery night the next day dawned bright and sunny and we set off for the 65 mile trip to Peterhead in a flat calm. Soon we had a gentle south westerly and motorsailed for a while. As the wind increased we sailed for three hours under full sail with a poled out jib. As it died again it highlighted the frustration of sailing a slow, heavy long keeler, as Solpieter continued to make reasonable progress under sail for another couple of hours.
Sod’s law dictated that as the tide went foul, the wind came back on the nose from the north east at twelve to eighteen knots, but it only got a bit cloudy and we remained chipper as we battered to Peterhead, arriving an hour or so after Solpieter. Whilst Peterhead Marina, in a corner of the large, perfectly sheltered fishing harbour, is in many ways the best place for yachts on the east coast of Britain, it is almost literally in the shadow of a maximum security prison. Notable for the number of serial killers who hail from the town, Peterhead is not Scotland’s loveliest or most salubrious town.
The next morning Anna headed off back home to earn some money to keep me in the style to which I have become accustomed and the rest of us looked at the forecast. Being wimps we contemplated the batter round Rattray Head with northerly wind against tide with trepidation. Fresh in my mind was the story of another Port Edgar boat, the Contessa 32 ‘Marisca’, whose skipper had recently to call on a Fisheries Protection Vessel for help when his liferaft was swept off the deck as he was going round Rattray Head, mostly under water. I reminded myself that Cap’n Marisca is known to be a considerable nutter when it comes to weather conditions and had probably gone when the forecast was force 9 from the north west.
We had more or less decided to wait a day, despite the prospect of a soul sapping stay in this home of imprisoned psychopaths and birthplace of serial killers when Ian, observing the falling wind conditions, girded his loins and spurred us on to action.
Nervously we battered against the waves but as we rounded Rattray Head the wind died, the sun came out and we had an uneventful and pleasant delivery trip to Whitehills under motor with no wind. Well, uneventful except for my attempts to avoid colliding with Solpieter, which appeared to have her autopilot set to ‘Zoph Seeking’ mode. With the whole North Sea to aim at she was permanently coming up from behind, so to speak, on a collision course.
It was an easier entry into Whitehills than Ian and I had the previous autumn, when we surfed into the scary entrance in a force six northerly whilst delivering a friend’s wee back from the west coast. On that occasion we had turned sharp left into the wee harbour just when it felt like we were about to founder on, ironically, the lifeboat slip. That time we were followed in by another boat from the Forth, a Beneteau 31 called ‘Mrs Chippy’. She had distinguished herself a couple of years earlier by completing the Stavanger to Banff race across the North Sea with a crew of three blokes who had three legs and three arms between them. A bit of their story is in my earlier tale ‘Skagerrak and Back’.
On this latter occasion, for Zoph and Solpieter, Whitehills was a pussy cat and makes a very pleasant and secure stopover. The whole bungalow packed full of stuff for the few visiting yachts is probably the best facility for visiting yachties on the east coast.
The next day dawned bright and sunny and we got a good gentle beat for an hour or so in seven knots of wind. Then it died and we motored most of the rest of the way to Lossiemouth. This time I motored out of Whitehills without, as was the case last time, an onshore force six and a racy yacht zooming past me a couple of feet away in the fifteen metre wide channel with her go faster stripes, doing handbrake turns as though heading across the start line on a Sunday race around the cans.
Later, in full sun and on a flat sea a brand new, hyper-racy Beneteau 40 called ‘The Black Prince’ passed us on her delivery trip round from the Clyde to Port Edgar and I spoke to one of her delivery crew on the VHF for a minute. This was the Port Edgar Yacht Club Commodore’s latest acquisition, in his efforts to razz yet faster round the buoys on a Sunday. There’s something about putting ‘The’ in front of the name ‘Black Prince’ that makes her sound more like a Hollywood film than a yacht.
In the end the breeze got back up to ten knots and we were able to sail the last couple of miles to Lossie. On these gentle cruising trips involving, as they tend to, a lot of motoring, it’s always nice to con yourself into thinking you’ve sailed the passage by finishing with the sails up and the engine off.
The impression of summer continued in the town, as sprogs with buckets and spades paddled off the nearby beach and ran barefoot down the streets excitedly shouting “Mummy, Mummy, why have my toes turned black” and “Mummy, Mummy I can’t feel my legs”. You have to be hardy when the best summer weather occurs at about five degrees centigrade.
The next day was another bright, calm, sunny day as we motored out of Lossie towards Inverness Firth. The passage was enlivened by hundreds of gannets and their chums of other species enjoying diving from height into the mirror calm sea. Around midday a wee breeze started from the north east and we reached under full sail in seven to fifteen knots of true wind.
Despite the appalling set of their tiny cruising chute, the 36ft racing yacht Solpieter almost managed to overhaul the 27ft slow cruiser Zophiel, though to their credit they did seem to be sailing as slow as possible. A few miles before Chanonry point and the entrance to Inverness Firth Solpieter’s sails disappeared as she motored hard the eight miles or so to the sea lock. Enjoying the sun Zoph carried on under full sail and got there at four to five knots just nicely before the last locking time. Later Pieter crowed to the yacht club’s email group about how his racing yacht had ‘beaten’ Zoph. He omitted to mention, however, that his magnificent victory had involved motoring all the way, whereas Zoph had sailed all the way. Mind you, they were under a considerable handicap - an inability to steer straight. This handicap caused them to run aground on the point of land just before the Clachnaharry Sea Lock. Easily done since it’s only marked really clearly on all the charts and their chartplotter and echo sounder were working perfectly well.
The Inverness end of the Caledonian Canal is the Clachnaharry Sea Lock. It’s a pretty spot on a nice calm evening and that’s where Zoph was left on the first night by the lock keeper, a friendly chap who unaccountably calls everyone ‘Mannie’. “Hello Mannie how are you doing Mannie ach that’s fine Mannie well well Mannie”. Solpieter, with a magnificent burst of motorised speed, had made it through the next lock and the railway bridge to Seaport Marina.
Clachnaharry earns its place in Inverness folklore from the fact that it is the last stop on the train before Inverness. Hence the phrase 'getting off at Clachnaharry' being Sneckian for coitus interruptus. The Clachnaharry Inn is destined to enter the folklore for its extraordinary anti-customer policies. The proprietor explained to Ian and Pieter, in snooty tones that echoed around the deserted tables in his empty pub, that they were full and we couldn't possibly eat there. He later served me a pint of a different (and more expensive) beer to the one I’d asked for. When I pointed out his mistake and with saintly good grace agreed to take the wrong order to save him wasting it, he remained unapologetically standing with his hand outstretched waiting for the additional 10p that the wrong beer cost. Thereby earning himself 10p, a lifetime's seething, rancorous resentment and, hopefully, shed loads of bad publicity. Getting off the train in Clachnaharry? To be honest I'd prefer coitus interruptus.
Ian and Peter headed back south, leaving Solpieter at Seaport Marina. This is one of the more annoying places to leave a boat in Scotland. When you enquire about the price the people in the office proudly crow about how theirs is the cheapest marina in Scotland, at eight quid a night per boat. In fact it’s the most expensive, since you’ve already paid seventeen quid per metre for a 7 day licence for the canal. So leaving Zoph for a week would cost £195. It’s extremely annoying to have to hand over that amount of cash to someone who keeps telling you that you ought to be pathetically grateful that it’s so cheap. Adding insult to injury they call their one week pass an ‘eight day licence’, on the grounds that you leave on the eighth day. If you book into a hotel for one night you check out on the second day of your stay, but they don’t charge you for two days.
Zoph and I spent a day or so waiting in Inverness for Anna to come back up for the weekend. She’d earned enough money to warrant a trip down the Caley Canal. This wait was enlivened by wandering the canal side squinting at boats and chandleries.
The trimaran ‘Hei Matau’ (Walter for short), was in the canal. She is another boat whose sometime home was Port Edgar. I’d last seen this frightening set of three loosely strapped together surfboards in St Lucia, after the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers in 2008. The time before that was in the Canaries and the time before that was at Port Ed, when I’d crewed on her in a gentle breeze and a flat sea. On that occasion within the space of 5 minutes we’d lost the jib, the main and the engine, done untold amounts of damage and effectively invalidated a race by sailing off with one of the race marks. Sailing her across the Atlantic would be like crossing an ocean on a Musto Skiff or ploughing a field using Shergar instead of a carthorse. She wouldn’t be my choice of vessel for the job.
Another minor highlight was the man in Caley Marina, talking to a potential customer about boats for sale. He pointed out that they had easily and rapidly sold some reduced price Orkney motor boats recently. “They flew out of here” he explained. “They literally flew out of here”.... “They absolutely literally flew out of here”. I wish I'd been there to see that.
One of the major hazards of navigating the Caley Canal is the hordes of motor cruisers rented out each week to people the large majority of who’s boat handling experience has involved manoeuvring their rubber duck around the bath. Aware of the potential damage to their fleet, hirers such as Caley Cruisers fit thick strips of black rubber all round the widest points of their scruffy, scratched, dented craft. This affords them some protection, ensures the maximum impact on the hulls of private yachts and signals clearly to their clients that they are in fact bumper-boats and the object of the game is to bump into as many things as possible. Heading up the Fort Augustus lock staircase in company with a few of these scarred nightmares can be fraught. So noticing the door of Caley Cruisers’ office ajar approaching five o'clock I stuck my head in and asked when they tended to set off their hire boats. “About two thirty on Friday and Saturday. Are you on a private boat?” The girlie immediately replied. Clearly I wasn’t the first concerned yachtie to ask the question.
The very first lesson given the new arrivals at Caley cruisers says it all. As they approach their new charges they see how they have been tied up by the professionals. In a row along the quay, each boat has been rammed arse-first against the concrete wall, with no fenders. holding each stern hard against the rough concrete are two piano-wire-tight lines, each about a foot long. And nothing else. On board they hop, untie the two ropes and blast off into the sunset looking for 27ft private yachts to ram.
The wind only blows up or down Loch Ness, either south west or north east, so with a forecast of force three or four from the south east I confidently expected bugger-all and we motored out onto the loch. As the north east wind rose to twenty eight knots we zoomed the twenty five miles up the loch at over six knots under jib alone, gybing every now and then. For once Sod’s law didn’t apply and despite the forecast we had the wind behind us throughout the day. The sun condescended to stay out all day as well and we tied up to the pontoon at the bottom of the locks at Fort Augustus for the night, tucked out of the way of rogue bumper-boats.
We also managed to avoid the Caley Cruisers ascending the staircase of locks at Fort Augustus the next morning, but went in the company of a knackered old private gin palace whose driver only reluctantly turned off the massive old engines which belched black smoke into the enclosed locks. This motor boat gloried in the name ‘Linda Luv’, which I think paints a pretty fair picture of the boat and her crew.
The rest of the gloriously sunny day was spent slowly pootling through some locks into the shallow, island strewn Loch Oich, at the top level of the canal, where we spent the afternoon and night tied to a wee jetty. The peace was only marred by five teenagers on a bumper-boat who joined us and started getting pissed. They were, however, startlingly conservative in their habits and had shut up completely by about ten p.m. Absolutely no stamina your modern teenager. What’s wrong with the youth of today?
Yet another fine, dry, sunny day saw us motoring and motorsailing down Loch Lochy and along the canal beside about a thousand cyclists on a sponsored charity ride from Fort Bill to Sneck. As we approached Corpach we experienced the perennial problem of the Fort William climate that has plagued visitors and locals alike for centuries. Dust storms. Yes, the dry weather had cyclists wearing protective masks as the gentle breeze threw up little whirlwinds of dust. In Corpach the locals were complaining about how the drought was knackering the gardens. The local camels were dying of thirst. Ben Nevis stood clear and - I have to say - majestic on the horizon. Yes, that’s right, we could actually see the whole of Ben Nevis. Against a blue sky. There are adults who have lived in Fort Bill their whole lives who have never seen Ben Nevis. That’s how good the weather was on May 1st.
We practically zoomed down the eight
locks of ‘Neptune’s Staircase’ in company with a racy 36ft
yacht crewed by a posh family in a hurry and settled for the night in
the jewel of the west coast, Corpach, just next to the highland’s
only sink estate. The night was only marred by the bloody ‘Lord
of the Flies Isles’, a massive
converted ferry which only just fits into the locks and is the most
stupid and most expensive way of experiencing the Caledonian Canal.
As she arrived at the sea lock at sunset on a perfect, calm, warm
evening, not one of her £2000-for-a-weekend-cruise passengers
bothered coming out on deck to look at the perfect view. Needless to
say the antisocial bastards kept their engines running all night,
disturbing all and sundry so that a couple of geriatric American
tourists could have the central heating turned up to thirty degrees
centigrade and watch the telly.
Wild West
The next morning I packed Anna back off to Edinburgh to work, as I thought she’d had enough of a break, whilst Zoph and I headed out to sea. Just out of the sea lock my trusty old Garmin 128 GPS failed. It started beeping and failing to find any satellites. For a while I hoped that this was because the Americans had switched off the system due to impending nuclear war or some other catastrophe. At least that would mean there was nothing wrong with my machine. But no such luck and the bloody thing played up most of the way round Ireland. The folk at the marine electronics specialists at Port Edgar later helpfully explained that it was probably a bit old or something and they had no idea what was wrong with it. It wasn’t exactly crucial as I had a shiny new chart plotter as well, but I’d got used to my old GPS.
I sailed through the Corran Narrows and south to Loch Creran in a fluky, gusty wind that rose during the day but still varied between force five and force zero. I sailed right into Loch Creran and on the way out met some other chums from Port Edgar. Dave Punton and Nial McHugh, the ‘Odd Couple’, on their Sigma 33 ‘Kittiwake’, were motoring back in to their mooring. I had an ulterior motive for catching them as I thought my kedge anchor warp was on Kittiwake after I’d helped Dave deliver her from the Bristol Channel the previous year. The bloody thing seems to have vanished into thin air however and I came away empty handed.
I picked up a visitors’ mooring at Port Appin for the night. These had previously been free if you had a pint in the hotel, but now they want a tenner for them. We are just emerging from quite a good period for picking up moorings on the west coast of Scotland. For years many of the old HIDB moorings had been unmaintained and getting more and more dodgy. More recently various pubs, hotels and community groups had been maintaining these moorings and laying more and more, offering them free to bring money into local businesses. Now they have worked out that they can also get money for them and they are getting greedier and greedier. £10 seems to have become the basic minimum, which is not bad for a mob-handed 40 footer but close to commercial rates for a wee 27 footer. Often for an exposed mooring that you need to bugger off from when the wind changes direction.
Some things are getting more free however. When I went for a walk down the peninsula a notice on gate in the middle of the track, painted roughly on a piece of plywood, said “Camping with Permission”. This seemed an odd thing to write on a notice. Then I spotted the rear of the plywood. Whitewashed out yet still clearly visible was the professionally painted legend “NO CAMPING”. Clearly the miserly toff who ‘owned’ the estate had been forced to take down the ‘no camping’ sign in the wake of access legislation. Travelling elsewhere in the ‘Celtic Fringe’ did make me appreciate how lucky we are in Scotland to be able to access the land.
The Pier House Hotel has ideas above its station. Entering the pub for a pint a wifey with airs, graces and a professional smile asked if “Sir requires a table for one”. The bar no longer feels like a pub bar so much as a waiting area for a restaurant table. I sat on a bar stool feeling slightly unwelcome and failing to engage the barman in conversation.
The rural west of Scotland is littered with that most deadly of curses of local pubs, worse even than large screen tellies, the moron on a bar stool. In pub after pub a bloke, evidently a more or less permanent fixture, drones on and on about such mindless trivia as to drive the rest of the clientele away. I often wonder if this is mentioned in the particulars for prospective purchasers of pubs. “Well appointed going concern the potential of which is limited by the permanent fixture on a bar stool”. I wonder if there have been any cases of such fixtures snuffing it in suspicious circumstances when landlords have been driven over the edge as their clientele is reduced to one bloke on a bar stool. Since Sir didn’t require a table for one I rowed back to the boat after one desultory pint.
Another gorgeous day saw us under full sail all day past Kerrera, out to the Garvellachs and back to the lovely, sheltered and for once almost empty but still unspellable anchorage at Puilladobhrain. A fantastic day’s gentle sailing in full sun, rounded off by a fine sunset in company with only two other boats. Another month or so and there would be thirty or more boats crammed together in the anchorage. I invited a chap from the nearby Ohlsen 38 on board for a beer. This was handy as he seemed to be that rarest of things, a charcoal stove nerd, who was able to tell me all about my smoky, malfunctioning stove. Apparently, it turns out to be an ‘Atkey Pansy’, though I don’t know why I’m bothering to tell you that.
One more fantastic weather day as I motorsailed then sailed south down the Sound of Luing with up to four knots of tide and up to fifteen knots of breeze, but a flat sea. Right up the Dorus Mhor then a nice fast reach up to my favourite marina, Ardfern. There are several reasons why Ardfern is my favourite marina, not least amongst which are that it is open, with no high walls round it and doesn’t really feel like a marina at all. It’s also cheap for visitors in small yachts. This comes as a bit of a surprise once you’ve clocked all the posh boats on ‘millionaire’s row’. Ardfern charge for moorings by the metre, which is handy if you have a 27 footer. At Ardfern the cost of a commercial mooring with all facilities where you can happily leave your boat is less than the ‘nominal charge’ made for some of the most expensive club moorings in piss-poor bays with neither facilities nor shelter.
The weather was finally due to break so I decided to leave Zoph at Ardfern for a few days. I left brimming with confidence about the long hot summer ahead and all the time I would have to get round Ireland - and possibly further. It was only May the fourth and I was already at a jumping-off point for Ireland. I hadn’t expected to have left Port Ed until the start of May so I was well ahead of schedule. A couple of days at home and I’d be back to enjoy more glorious weather and a fantastic early summer. The month of May stretched ahead of me invitingly.
By June the boat was still in Ardfern. I’d not progressed a single solitary inch. May was a total meteorological disaster. The only thing to be said in its favour is that at least I didn’t have to sit on the boat enduring its endless gales and downpours. At least I could get on with something else instead of sailing.
I did come back during May and have another go. On May the thirteenth, which was of course a Friday, there was a tiny chink in the forecast. A miniscule bright window of weather in which it might be possible to sail appeared in the long dark tunnel of storm clouds which otherwise stretched until the end of time.
Before I left Ardfern I headed for the fuel berth. First I had to wait for two hippies - an Anglo-Japanese couple in a scruffy old 32ft ketch - to vacate the berth. They live aboard, almost always at anchor, on the west coast all year, making ends meet by collecting shellfish in the intertidal zone. This they sell directly to dealers at the quayside. I’m not sure I’d fancy the January gales on an anchor. Never being able to leave your house for more than an hour in case it blew away in a blizzard would not breed a sense of relaxed security. But each to their own.
As they vacated the berth some oldsters in an immaculate - and extraordinarily expensive looking - Grand Banks motorsailer muscled in and got on the fuel berth ahead of me. On my last visit I’d seen one of the lads employed by Ardfern scrubbing away with a toothbrush at a tiny bit of algae that had grown in the join between the hull and the glossy teak nameplate. Clearly the owners weren’t short of a bob or two. As the marina manny filled up their twin 1000 litre tanks he told me who owned it. It was the son of a famous Blair, who lived off the Blair estate, which presumably still brings in a fair amount of dosh. The Blair concerned wasn’t wanted for war crimes and it wasn’t Lionel. Any other ideas? You’ll have to read to the end for the answer. Or you could, I suppose, just turn to the back. Damn! I never thought of that.
Given that it’s cheap, Ardfern doesn’t half attract a lot of posh stuff. Top of the toffs list is Anne Phillips-Laurence, nee Windsor, who kept a Rustler 36 there. I understand she’s now traded it in for something bigger, which is undeniable a good use of taxpayers’ money. There’s so many Rustler 36s at Ardfern that it’s hard to tell which one is hers. Presumably a lot of sub-toffs buy them in an effort to keep up with the Windsors.
Posher still was one of the boats at Craobh Haven, a walk away north over the hill. Tied to the end of one trot of pontoons was the ketch ‘Northern Spirit’. Its bow protruded four metres past one finger pontoon, it stretched the full length of the pontoon, across the main pontoon, the full length of the opposite finger and its stern stuck out another four metres. It was 122 feet long and its mizzen mast, much smaller than the main mast, made the mast of a nearby Moody 54 sloop look pathetically tiny. It was blinking huge. Walking on the pontoon I was not tall enough to see on deck. Its flag was the size of Zoph’s mainsail.
In the on-site pub I asked about it. Nobody there seemed to have noticed it and when I pointed it out they found it unremarkable. The barmaid said it belonged to a young Kiwi couple who were cruising about on it. Given that it flew a red ensign, must have cost many millions and yet had disgorged a couple of rusting bikes and a box of flip-flops onto the pontoon, I guessed that the Kiwi couple were some of the crew and had been winding the barmaid up. “No, no” she said, “they own it and are just cruising about visiting friends”. She didn’t seem to find this in any way remarkable. In reality Northern Spirit is owned by a company and you can charter her from as little as €52,000 a week. But the Kiwis must have had fun pretending to own her and living it up in between corporate charters. At 122ft, by the way, she sleeps six, which seems to me like poor use of space.
On May the fourteenth I headed off down the Sound of Jura making for Gigha under full sail. The wind was a light north easterly, but it rose during the day until, by the time I was closing on the McCormack Isles off the entrance to Loch Sween it was pretty much a proper force six. With a couple of reefs in this was fine, except that I was - perhaps foolishly - towing the dinghy. Once this had flipped over a total of thirty four times I decided enough was enough and headed up Loch Sween for Tayvallich. To add to the excitement, as I was close hauled up the loch I noticed that one of the gas rings on the cooker had been knocked onto full on and the boat was full of deadly butane. Since the charcoal stove was burning I assumed that the concentration of gas wasn’t great enough to have caused a fatal explosion, so we sailed the rest of the way with all hatches open and me pumping madly on the bilge pump.
This was also the day of the Scottish Three Pekes race. I phoned Ian Macaroon whilst the pekes were running up a mountain on Jura. The crew of Solpieter were contemplating a run round the fabled Mull of Kintyre in a following force six and hoping to get round before the tide changed. In the event the timing was good and they made it round in good time.
An old 12m yacht called ‘Sceptre’ wasn’t so fortunate. Having run aground on Jura and suspecting that they had done some damage, they left their pre-pubescent runners from a posh public school ashore on Jura and retired from the race. Unaccountably, for some reason, they then decided to sail off round the Mull on ‘Septic’ in a rising force six against the tide. Unsurprisingly the place where they lost all steerage was just off the Mull and they needed both the Campbeltown lifeboat and a big naval shooty-ship to tow them into port. They were reported to have been ‘unlucky’ to lose steerage as they did. I wouldn’t claim any great expertise in the matter but weren’t they just daft to have set off in such conditions on a damaged boat, as opposed to being unlucky?
Tayvallich looks like the most perfect natural harbour possible. It’s the twee-est of villages surrounding a perfect round pool a few hundred yards across and about four metres deep. Having dragged the anchor, with 35m of chain, right through the moorings twice in an easterly in the past, I knew it wasn’t actually that perfect. There’s three visitor moorings and visitor pontoons now and since it was only the beginning of May a mooring was available. Tayvallich is one of the clubs that claims to charge a ‘nominal sum’ for their moorings. At ten squid a night the three moorings are fully occupied all summer and at fifteen quid a night the pontoons do a brisk trade, netting them an estimated £5000 a year. I don’t object to people running commercial, profit making operations, but I do wish they wouldn’t pretend that they are a bleedin’ charity and go on about ‘nominal’ charges. I mentioned this to the Tayvallich moorings police, who explained that the income from visitors had to pay the full costs of all the pontoon facilities. I asked if the pontoon was primarily for the use of local members, not the visitors who were paying for it. ‘Yes’ he said. I pointed out that on that basis they were actually making a profit. He had difficulty with this concept. I pointed out that if I charged thousands of pounds for services rendered, then claimed that I wasn’t making a profit on it and that it was a charitable act on the grounds that I had to pay for my house, my car, my food, my boat and holidays in the Bahamas out of it, this wouldn’t cut much ice. The blank look grew marginally blanker.
That nice calm, quiet night was marred by the screaming engines which blared out over the bay all night, from dusk to dawn, bouncing off the hills and houses and echoing out over the water. In the morning I was able to establish that this racket had been caused by a fisherman on a small boat in the harbour. It was, apparently, important for him to run two generators all the time to watch the football and then keep the cabin lights on all night. Presumably he was afraid of the dark.
Disturbed on another mooring was a Westerly Tempest from Holyhead. I asked the couple on board if they knew my Uncle John, who in his eighties continued to sail an old Hallberg Rassy out of the club there. “Yes, I know John”, said the bloke. “I often enjoy sitting in the club bar at Holyhead spending hours talking to him”. “Well, corrected his wife”, “listening to him”. John did tend to have fixed and complicated opinions about things. I wonder how we can possibly be related.
The weather window had collapsed suddenly and without warning like a Microsoft one and I ended up staying three nights in Tayvallich as forecasts in excess of force six from the south west continued not to amount to anything, but the weather remained universally wet and horrible. In the end I gave it up as a bad job and motorsailed back to Ardfern in a lull in the wind but in persistent drizzle. I left the boat on the same mooring as before and buggered off back to Edinburgh to observe the closely packed isobars sweeping in from the west in wave after wave which completely knackered the whole of May. The week beginning May the twenty third saw apocalyptic winds - the biggest anyone could remember - bringing untold damage at sea and on shore, scorching all the leaves, turning all the trees brown and bringing autumn to the west coast of Scotland and Ireland six months early. The signs were not good. From being well ahead of the game we were now approaching June and with south-westerly gales Ireland might as well be the other side of the Atlantic.
It was June the second before another window opened and even that looked like it might get jammed and painted shut. Early on the morning of June the second I headed out of Ardfern and south for Gigha in no wind but a dreich drizzle that seemed to sum up that early summer, my mood and the chances of actually ever getting to Ireland. Why was I bothering to plough on south in the freezing damp when I’d just end up turning tail and heading back? The ominous swirly tides around the Dorus Mhor just added to the sense of underworld gloom.
But the breeze picked up from the north east and slowly, very slowly, the day cleared. The wind stayed on the quarter and as I turned east of south round the McCormack Isles - the only islands in Scotland owned by a political party (the Scot Nats), it backed conveniently to keep me on a perfect reach. As I picked up one of the fifteen or so visitors’ buoys at Gigha the sky cleared completely, the sun shone and it turned into an utterly perfect summer’s day.
Gigha has the same sort of peculiarly attractive quality as Iona, which the dim-witted ascribe to ‘an aura of spirituality’. “The quality of the light”, they say, “is indescribably different due to the uniquely deep religiosity of the place”. In reality, of course, it’s more simple. Both Iona and Gigha have shallow, sandy-bottomed sea, giving them a turquoise colour and making the light bright and full of colour. For the frustrated middle class nutty tourist in search of god, he seems to reside, like lugworms, in a shallow sandy sea. There’s relatively few places with this sort of sandy bottom where you can anchor securely. A sandy shore usually means a windswept lee shore. Us yachties are condemned forever to anchor on gloopy mud and leave the deep spirituality of a shallow sandy bottom to more enlightened folk. Gigha is an exception, as long as the wind stays in the west. As soon as it blows from the east you know all about lee shores, as I’ve discovered on a couple of previous occasions.
This time however, oddly given the conditions of the past month or so, the gentle breeze remained benignly in the west. My luck was holding well that night. Down the pub a local told me that was the last night before they started charging ten quid a night for their dodgy moorings, which are untenable as soon as the wind shifts.
Cranium
It cannot have escaped your notice that Ireland looks like a huge baby. The map of Ireland that is. Therefore those of you for whom, like me, its geography is something of a mystery, need not despair. Given that Ireland is just the next door bit of land my knowledge of its layout is shamefully poor. I know lots of names of towns and counties but couldn’t for the life of me place them on a map. Like most people I sort of assumed that ‘Northern Ireland’ took up much of the north of Ireland. In reality it’s just the top north east corner.
To assist us in our geographical ignorance, it obviously helps to think of Ireland as a huge struggling baby, with its head facing Britain but its arms and legs straining out into the Atlantic trying to get away. I’m not sure how well the metaphor stands up politically (actually not too badly perhaps, given their history and apparent love affair with America), but the physical resemblance is clear. Lough Neagh is the baby’s large eye, Strangford Lough its nostrils, Carlingford Lough its mouth. Donegal is the cranium, counties Mayo and Galway the arms, Kerry and Cork the legs and Rosslare, appropriately enough, the arsehole. For your convenience the rest of my cruise round Ireland is therefore described in these helpful anatomical terms.
The weather continued perfect and sunny the next day in what the media began referring to without apparent irony as a ‘heat wave’. I’m not entirely sure that two days without rain qualifies as a heat wave. Perhaps that’s symptomatic of how crap our recent summers have been and how low our expectations have become.
With bugger all wind and in full sun we motored south, getting some benefit from the flood tide towards Rathlin Island and crossing the shipping lanes just ahead of a big scary tanker coming in from the west. Two yachts passed me heading north as the marinas of Northern Ireland emptied into the west of Scotland for the summer, as is their wont. The idea was to get to Rathlin at about slack water and turn west, getting the benefit of the ebb to Portrush, the last coastal port before Loch Foyle and the Irish Republic. It only just didn’t quite work properly and I had an hour or so of tide against me before it turned and I motored on a glassy sea the 46 miles to Portrush. There I tied up on the single long pontoon just behind a dirty great English tall ship whose crew were making ends meet by taking locals for trips round the bay.
In Portrush, just above Ireland’s hairline, I was soon joined by two local yachts from Coleraine en route to Rathlin for a party. Their skippers dragged me kicking and screaming to the pub where we spoke to quite a number of the local yachtie populace. I asked them all about the coast further west and they all looked at me blankly. None of them had the slightest idea what it was like cruising westward beyond the river Bann. That was the Republic and they all cruised north and east to Scotland. They were extremely friendly and one bloke even tried to press upon me his brand new pilot book of Northern and Eastern Coasts of Ireland (my copy is about a decade old), going home to fetch it and insisting that I take it with me. None of them, however, knew anything about the coast further west. Instead they regaled me with stories about Islay and Gigha, Jura and Mull, Skye and onwards to the north. To them the west of Scotland was their back yard and their local cruising ground, a short hop away across the dodgy North Channel. For them the Celtic Fringe was real enough - they identified closely with the islands to the north. But whether for deeply held political reasons or just because Scottish waters are a more sheltered cruising ground than Irish waters, they were blind to anything further west.
I had observed this before - this close affinity which the boating community of Northern Ireland feel for Scotland. An awful lot of them don’t have yachts but fast ribs. These are called things like ‘Sanda’ and ‘Eriskay’ and they take their owners on quick trips over to the pub in what we would consider to be practically another country. Many of their owners live on the north coast of Ireland and from the sofas in their five bedroomed commuter houses, an hour from Belfast, ranged along the cliff tops facing north, they can clearly see Islay and the Mull of Kintyre. To most of us in Scotland, Northern Ireland feels a long way - possibly even an aeroplane flight - away. To many of the Northern Irish, Scotland forms the permanent backdrop to their lives. We are their neighbours but, paradoxically, they aren’t our neighbours. It’s as though there’s a huge one-way mirror somewhere in the North Channel. They look over at us and see our every move. We hardly ever notice that they are there. A trip to the Northern Irish coast gives a first inkling of the interconnectedness of the Celtic lands. For us in the Central Belt England perhaps seems like our nearest neighbour. By sea its a million miles away whilst Ireland is a mere stones throw.
Encouraged by the friendliness of the Northern Irish, I was looking forward to hitting Eire. With its legendary friendly people and Guinness I felt I was assured of a warm welcome. The weather didn’t look too friendly however and seemed set to cut up rough. After our two day ‘heat wave’ normal service was to be resumed. It was cloudy and sometimes dreich and whilst the wind was only going to be about a force five, it would be right on the nose all the way to Malin Head, after which we would be in the proper North Atlantic, with permanent westerly swell and, in this instance, a two knot tide against the swell to turn it nice and vertical and choppy. With this in mind I looked at other options for ports in Eire but before the dreaded Malin Head. Lead contender was Greencastle, a port on the west side of Loch Foyle. To see what this friendly little port was like for yachts I Googled “Yachts Greencastle” and this was the first result the computer threw up...
“IRISH TIMES MAY 20TH 2011 - “Anger as three yachts denied port in Donegal storm”