Another glorious day in paradise! A beautiful morning, and it feels as if we are abroad. The sun is shining, the water is calm, the landscape is gorgeous and it feels difficult to believe we are sitting on the top of Scotland.
Very peaceful indeed, but an uneasy sleep being at anchour. Did you read yesterdays blog to see that Rick had gone to bed (John was in his room on the telephone) and Mike and I were watching a DVD. Imagine how embarrassed we felt when Rick emerged from his cabin to inform us the anchor alarm was sounding, it had awoken him, yet we were ignoring it!
What actually happened was – we were watching a medical drama, and there was a medical emergency ensuing, and the alarms on all the machines in his hospital room were sounding as he was having a cardiac arrest – so we heard the anchor alarm, but just thought it was part of the film we were watching……oops! Next time we are on anchor watch, we need to watch Laurel and Hardy instead!
When you are at anchor, you don’t want your boat straying anywhere whilst you are sleeping, but there is always some movement due to wind, tides and waves, so you have to anticipate you are going to move – just not very far. So you can set an anchor alarm to alert you if your boat moves from a defined position. We set this to 0.01 of a nautical mile. This normally works well – but the computer uses GPS – which is all well and good until it loses its signal….and alarms start to ring – which they did on a few more occasions. Another disadvantage of sleeping in the aft cabin – you are the one who will hear the alarm. John and Mike were oblivious to it all, as were they oblivious to the VHF which we kept on in case someone should call us to warn us we are straying (as they did in Loch Inverie when our dinghy went walkabout!)
Anyway – here we are now, in paradise, cleaning out the holding tanks for our heads. About to set out, and I’m making use of the nearby radio mast to post a blog, and will shortly make some bacon sandwiches – as I said, another day in Paradise!
An abandoned village right on the coast at the mouth of the Kyle of Tongue
Our sail is now complete and we are sitting in a bar enjoying a pint and once again contributing to the local economy,
We have had a wonderful day today, not only sailing in great weather (no rain again!), passing by lovely landscapes, deserted coastal villages, seeing lovely birds like the artic skua go by but the sailing was also very interesting!
I have already posted photos of this lovely bird!
I have mentioned before that we are going through a transition from just obeying orders in a robotic fashion to starting to think for ourselves. Today we took it a step further as Rick took to his bunk to sleep!
Today I was navigating, taking us from Kyle of Tongue (Tamarind) to Scrabster is easy and I instructed the helm to “come out of here and hang a right” That was fine for a while, then it got a bit technical as we now had to work with the wind with our skipper slumbering!
I remember the first birth I attended as a student midwife without the qualified midwife present, thinking I was all alone. Once the baby was born, I was short of towels, and, just like a miracle, a bale of towels arrived in the hand of my supervising midwife – she had been listening at the door! I know Rick was only pretending to snooze and he was waiting for us to make the decision to put a reef in the sail.
I was on the helm and took my time to make the decision and gave my instructions. It was a bit of a slow process, but we got there in the end. Rick, then emerged from his cabin – took a look up, and said we had done very well. He suggested that putting our first reef in was a bit like a first kiss. Yes, we had to agree – we were a bit slow to get round to it and it got a bit messy, but we got there in the end! Just like a first kiss!
The wind continued to blow and we were eventually sailing in a Force 6 which was fabulous!
Thurso in the distance
Scrabster was looming near and I radioed the harbour on the VHF, feeling much more at ease with it now, but still a little unclear what “brevity and discipline” means!
We were met by yet another helpful harbour master and were really grateful for him for taking the lines. It would have needed spiderman to jump from the boat to the quayside and secured the lines, but I’m sure Mike could have obliged really!
The climb off the boat at low tide at neeps is interesting!
Another working area with the fishing industry around us.
We have a very noisy generator right next to us – but we are assured it gets switched off at 10pm – they didnt tell us the time it gets turned back on – but we are guessing it might be 6am!
We are going to spend our time tomorrow continuing with our studies, maybe doing some shopping, certainly finding some gas to replace the 2 empty cylinders and a spot of snoozing no doubt!
Time to head back to the boat and sleep – goodnight!
2 Responses to Day 51 – Kyle of Tongue to Scrabster