Well-known writer and Drascombe enthusiast Sam Llewellyn has very kindly offered two of his articles for reproduction here. Both are about cruises in the Hebrides and are hugely entertaining.
Sam is also author of the excellent Shadow in the Sands, a sequel to Erskine Childers' immortal Riddle of the Sands.
(This first piece was first published in the Daily Telegraph earlier this year)
The middle-aged Dutchman stood on Isleornsay quay in pressed Chinos, batting at midges, gloom etched on every feature. When the rain got too much, he climbed into his Mondeo and stared dully at us out of the window. Well, motoring holidays in Northwestern Scotland suffer from a lack of byroads, and an abundance of hotels where the welcome is warm but the sheets smell of cigarettes. Walking is worse. This is a land with its head and sometimes its waist in the clouds, to be trudged under bone-creaking rucksacks at two midge-racked miles an hour.
The Victorians, earliest holidaymakers in these parts, had the answer. They knew that the best way to get yourself and your supplies around the West Coast and the Hebrides is by sea. Distances are short, and midges do not venture more than ten yards off the beach. It is possible to charter boats from local entrepreneurs - a process favoured by those with deep pockets and nerves of steel. It is also possible to drag your own boat to the water, and float where you will.
This is how we came to be on Isleornsay Quay, David Burnett, Garlinda Birkbeck, T.Hex and myself, insulated from the weather by oilskins, under the eyes of the Dutchman. Our boats were rocking gently alongside - twenty-one-foot Drascombe Longboats, open yawls with some whaler in their ancestry, propelled by sails and outboards. The Cuillin Hills were a mighty sawblade overhead. Two pints of Guinness were within, and on the boats was dinner, ten pounds of langoustines bought at sea from a fisherman earlier in the day. For a week we had been sailing the waters north of Kyle Rhea, the Sound of Raasay and the Inner Sound, between the mainland and the Brobdignagian doorsteps of northern Skye. We grinned at the Dutchman. He gave us a watery smile back.
The essentials for travel in the Inner Hebrides are a seaworthy boat, with camping gear including a tent for the boat, not the land; a waterproof barrel, for the storage of dry clothes and sleeping bags away from rain and the occasional wave; a small sum of money, for use in pubs and on fishing boats; a barometer and a VHF radio, for the collection of weather forecasts, on which your life will depend; a volume of tide tables, ditto; a bottle of Laphroaig, with its regional smells of iodine and seaweed; charts and pilot books; and a set of industrial grade oilskins, to protect your person and particularly the seat of your pants, which you will need for navigation and most other functions.
This year's trip showed little promise. Statistically, the best chance of sun and light winds in northwest Scotland is during the first two weeks of June. News of this fact had however been slow to travel north. We pulled away from the slip at KinlochHourn on the 29th of May, in a violent northeast wind that smelt of snow. As we went down the eight-mile length of the sea loch, the slaty waves ahead began showing humped white crests. The mountains vanished into cloud. Kyle Rhea, the narrow gut between Skye and the mainland where the tide runs at five knots, was an ugly mass of standing waves. The front end of the boat went up, up, up, then slammed down, down, down, scooping gallons of water from the flank of the next wave. Pumping and cursing, the fleet struggled through Loch Alsh.
Beyond Loch Alsh and into the Inner Sound, things got worse. The wind had a clear eight-mile fetch down Loch Carron. The clouds were black as coal, and so was the sea. We shot along under postage-stamps of sail, keeping in pairs, each boat standing by to rescue another, groping absent-mindedly for seatbelts and finding none.
But ahead, a lump of rock was rising out of the half-light. This was Crowlin Island. We roared through shrieking squalls in the sound that separates its beetling cliffs from the saw-toothed skerries of the mainland. The rocky shores were solid, shelterless.
Then the cliffs parted like curtains, and the secret of Crowlin lay revealed - the glassy lagoon hidden at the island's centre. Here we anchored under the tolerant gaze of a couple of seals, lit all the gas burners and huddled into a tent. Circulation returned. The standing water steamed from the floorboards. The Hebridean peace descended.
This is a relative peace, not to be confused with silence. It is filled with the groan of anchor cables, the manic quacking of eider ducks, and the tootling of Hebridean cuckoos annnouncing the successful cuckolding of stonechats. It is produced by the fact that once you are among the islands it is not important where you go, as long as it is roughly downwind.
Next morning it was blowing gently from the east. We therefore hauled up some sails and headed west, for Caol Mor, the gap between Raasay and Scalpay. A black blob dwarfed by the mountains of Skye resolved itself into the conning tower of a Trident submarine. As we pulled in for lunch on a mooring buoy at Inverarish, on the southwestern corner of Raasay, an osprey flapped overhead. By five o'clock we had passed the terrifying black bluffs that guard the harbour of Portree, ignoring the shops and pubs within, independent of civilization.
We sailed on past huge fangs of rock jutting from the mist that smothered the mountain buttresses of Skye. A big swell was rolling out of the north. The solid hills of Raasay degenerated into a series of rocks and bays, in which the black swells burst in explosions of white spray. On the chart an anchorage was marked, a narrow slot of sheltered water inside Eilean Fladday. On the ground, there were only rocks and the vast sea and four tiny boats. The world felt dauntingly mythic. Ulysses would have felt right at home, but ordinary mortals had butterflies in their stomachs.
It was at this moment that T.Hex directed his boat straight at a nearby rock, cloaked in spray and crowned with gulls. One of the central rules of the expedition was to keep together, for better or for worse. We followed him in. At close range, the rock monolith became a duolith. We proceeded between Pillars of Hercules into a channel of water the colour and smoothness of jade. Here, among shafts of sunlight and further cuckoos, we camped the night.
Gaelic place names are not elaborate. "Mor" means "big", and "Aceirsheid" means "harbour." Trained linguists in the fleet worked out that our next port of call, Aceirsheid Mor, was probably a big harbour. It proved easier to find than most anchorages, since friendly souls have painted a large white arrow on the island stoppering its seaward end. After a detour to collect David, whose eyeballs had salted up and who was plugging steadily towards Spitzbergen, we cast anchor in one of its small, windless bays.
The sun came out. Ten yards away, clumps of sea pinks glowed against the black rocks. Above the rocks rowans were flowering knee-deep in lakes of bluebells. Up a short track from the slipway the neatest lodge in the Western Highlands stood in a mown lawn and a honeysuckle pergola.
This is the home of Donald and Fiona McCalman, sole permanent inhabitants of Rona's 27,000-odd acres. Their dogs Shadow and Mr McGregor are pleased to escort visitors to the summit of the island, where the 360 degree panorama of Skye and the long-cooled volcanoes of the mainland contrasts agreeably with the imprint of a pair of human buttocks in concrete, signed JOK - a shrine, presumably, for travellers by the seat of the pants.
Donald, a stocky man mightily earringed, keeps a suckler herd of Highland cattle, which he had temporarily mislaid. These hardy beasts have a disdain for bureaucrats so pronounced that when the man from the Ministry came round to do the ear tags, one cow swam with her calf into the middle of the harbour. Here they spent some time impersonating a lump of seaweed,the cow keeping the calf's head above water by supporting its chin with her nose.
On the north of Rona is a perfect lighthouse, the tower topped with a shiny black dome, the keepers' houses wedding-cake white. Other more sinister buildings lurk behind the rocks. The Sound of Raasay and the Inner Sound are a submarine exercise area, famous for mysterious lights and anomalous turbulences. We slid through a sunlit narrows into the inland sea that is Upper Loch Torridon and unleashed the Laphroaig. The conical hills at the eastern end of the loch turned gold, then red-hot. At about midnight, darkness fell.
We left Torridon in a fine Highland rain, warm and penetrating. The boats droned across a sheet of polished grey metal. Porpoises rolled, black guillemots fluttered, seals slept nose-up, and black-throated divers snorkelled, probably watching submarines. Sea and sky became inseparable, a dove-grey limbo. It was hard to tell whether we were at sea or in orbit. This disorientation strengthened as we passed Kyle of Lochalsh, and a piper in the hotel burst into a medley of Kenneth McKellar's greatest hits. Prawn fishermen were inserting giant scampi into special milk crates, in which they would reside until their arrival in Lisbon by refrigerated truck.
At seven, we were alongside at Isleornsay. The Dutchman smiled wanly from his car as we dug some Petit Chablis from under the boats' floorboards and moved out into the bay for the evening raftup. The langoustines boiled. The salt was passed, full-toss, from outside boat to outside boat. Inevitably, someone started singing.
Across the quicksilver water, the white Mondeo rose up the road, glimmered fitfully for a moment, and was swallowed in the black rain on the hills.
©Sam Llewellyn 1999
(From Sailing magazine, USA)
Hebridean Magic
There we were, fitting out for the season on the South Coast of England. We had rove miles of rigging, toted mighty batteries, dewinterised the engine, destunk the head. Now we were varnishing. The air was hot and sticky, loud with the whine of power tools. Ready to launch any day, in the English Channel, with about fifteen thousand other yachts. Classic sailing, of course. Harbours jammed with good company -
One of my yardmates, a man with a toothbrush moustache and razor-pressed acrylic yachting slacks, climbed into his powder blue Merc and covered my wet varnish with his wheelspin dust. I had this thought:
The hell with it.
It had been in the mind all winter. Ink-blue water and mountains, and no other sails at all. And a boat. Not a yacht. A boat, open. Me and the boat and the breeze, and some friends to talk to in the evenings. So now I went to the barn and hauled out Lucille, my old Drascombe Longboat, 21'6" long, 6' wide, open yawl with a steel centerplate. I evicted the mice from the cockpit tent, and had the frying pan sandblasted. Then I called Shorty and Bert, with whom I used to roam the Canadian north, and my cousin Garlinda, who likes trouble. All these people also own Longboats. We would trail them to Arisaig, Scotland, gateway to the Hebrides. We would sail solo by day, I proposed. At night we would raft up and discuss this and that, and party a bit. Then we could withdraw and anchor separately, in case anyone snored.
But of course, they all said at once.
The rest of the world was less sanguine. In the Hebrides, it pointed out, it rains continuously, usually with a gale thrown in. The tides run anywhere between two and eight knots. They take no prisoners, these Hebrides. They always come out on top. Nobody in their right mind would take a small open boats and sail them singlehanded -
But round about midsummer you have a good chance of high pressure.
Plus the Hebrides are magic, said Garlinda.
The doubters sort of drifted away.
So there we were, first day of June, 56° 53'N, latitude of northern Labrador, sky deep blue. Murdo, the gentle and priestly man who runs Arisaig Marine and Rare Books, smiled seraphically from his bicycle seat and waved a hand at a slipway half-clogged with vast pretzels of rusty iron. We placed the boats upon the sapphire bosom of the deep, stuffed gear into the lockers, and fired up the outboards. The skerries of that harbour dropped astern.
And there we were. There was dark blue water, no other sails. We tore south, four boats in line abreast, wakes creaming. Ahead, the mountains of the Ardnamurchan peninsula lay smoky on the sea. Somewhere at their base, hidden in a jumble of granite and heather, was the entrance to Loch Moidart.
To find it, we took bearings off the Sgurr or peak of Eigg, the flat-topped island floating twelve miles offshore. A low swell was bursting on the entrance rocks as we fiddled our way up to Eilean Ranouill, marked with the traditional Hebridean pole rusted to invisibility, and into a series of transits bewildering in their speed of arrival, not to mention their Gaelic names. Sgeir na Sgarbh half a cable to port, SE for Sgeir na Claidheamh, the loch bottom popping up to look at us, then fading into salmon-haunted deeps.
Inside the entrance islands, the Hebridean magic descended. We anchored in a patch of polished emerald between the ruins of Castle Tioram, burned in the 17th century by the Jacobite chief of the Clanranald so it would not fall into enemy hands, and Risca, a cone of Scots pines growing from green lawns. There we rafted up, and fried the mackerel we had caught, and drank Bert's 1992 Chenas until the sun dipped towards the horizon. In the night a blackbird played a long solo. The pink of sunset persisted, then became the pink of dawn. Towing the porridge saucepans from the transoms of the boats, we hauled in the mainsheets, and were gone.
There had been a plan. We would head north, coasting, never more than half an hour from shelter. But Shorty's grandfather's brass barometer was high as the Ace of Hearts; and out there, a dozen miles away on the Sea of the Hebrides, was Eigg.
Being a yawl, the Drascombe Longboat will sail herself for hours at a time, if you lash the tiller with a bit of shock cord. So we balanced up and surged off into the blue morning. Shorty fried himself a new breakfast. Bert delved in the capacious cellars under his bottomboards and fished out a cool beer, and Garlinda, having taken a couple of hundred photographs, settled to Anna Karenina on the Walkman. The morning slid away, a long blue heave, the bubble of the wake, the dip and stetch of the rig. By one, we were under Eigg, lunching. The glass was holding. The sky was high, with mare's tails. The breeze was small. Set fair. Hebridean magic...
We set off through the catabatic gusts bouncing out of the crags, west of Eigg, across the sound of Rhum, and up into the calm that lives to leeward of its thousand-foot green cliffs.
A hundred years ago, Rhum was settled by an industrialist by the name of Bullough. Leaving nothing to chance, Bullough shipped in bargeloads of lowland soil to start a farm. He also brought a twenty-bedroom granite palace stone by stone, preferring the colour of his home rock to the local article, which is nothing if not plentiful. His house now stands intact at the centre of the wild island, uninhabited except by oyster catchers and mould spores and Hebridean magic. Here on the swell by the great cliffs, you could see the man, on his buff-funnelled steam yacht, tall hat crammed down over his eyes, swathed in reeking waxed-canvas oilskins -
I woke up. A mile ahead, a couple of rafts of gulls were shrieking over mackerel shoals. Beyond them the sea had a frosted look,and there were white flashes that were not gulls. I creaked upright and stomped forward and hauled the main down a reef. It was almost too hot.
Then it was not hot any more.
The main flapped once, and banged like a strongroom door to the thump of the wind pouring out of the valley. The lee rail went six inches under. Water sluiced green into the sleeping quarters. Lucille shook herself, and began to truck northward in a cloud of spray. From the other boats floated the sound of cursing, and the grunt of hands at the pumps, and the flap of stalling oilskins. Next time there was leisure to look, the orderly line-abreast procession had become a diaspora. Bert was heading for the lee of the cliffs. Shorty and I were plugging on grimly, steady as she goes for the horribly distant smudge of Canna, the nearest shelter. And Garlinda was a distant tan wisp hull-down to the northwest, heading for Labrador in search of a freer wind, and not finding it.
We thrashed into Canna two and a half hours later, down to reefed jib and reefed mizzen. A couple of seals watched us wallop through the last of the seas and slide into the smooth harbour. Black gusts were whizzing across the grey surface. Without consultation, all four of us ran like hell for the weather shore and dropped our anchors. Then we started to laugh.
We stopped laughing for a couple of minutes when we noticed that all five anchors - I had shackled an old Danforth to the crown of my little Bruce - were travelling through the harbour bottom like chainsaws through fudge. The courtly, Gaelic-speaking skipper of a tourist boat pointed out that his friend's trawler was away to Benbecula, and why did we not pick up his mooring, chust? We picked it up.
Canna gives the impression of teetering on the brink of Creation. What trees there are huddle in crevices of the ground. Its handful of houses have an impermanent air, as if they were dropped from a height, blown higgledy-piggledy in mid air, and plumbed in where they fell. And even for the northwest of Scotland, a ratio of two churches to eight inhabitants speaks of a powerful sense of the imminence of the next world.
Eider ducks were swimming in the harbour, and red-throated loons snorkelling among the seals. All night long the wind played fiddle tunes in the rig. In the morning, the sun blazed down from a lapis lazuli vault. With the wind in our right eyes, we stuck the compass card onto 60° magnetic, and settled in for the fifteen mile hike over the seas to Skye.
It is a legend, this bit of the Sea of the Hebrides. To the north Skye marches away, cape on purple cape, and the peaks of the Outer Hebrides stand on the horizon, bonneted with cloud. On a normal day, this limb of the sea is grey as death, and in a northwesterly gale it breaks fifteen miles across, with frightful overfalls off the headlands. Today, it was blue as a baby's eyes. I put up a big fair weather spinnaker. Beyond the pink luff, a pair of golden eagles soared over the rock prisms of the Cuillins.
At Loch Scavaig, a river flows fifty feet down to the sea through sun-warmed bowls of rock. In these we removed three days' salt, wallowing like seals. Garlinda found her own pool behind a convenient rock, much to the delight of a nearby camper whose orange tent she had overlooked. Three thousand feet above, the sunset drew a red-hot margin along the ridge. Shorty's grandfather's barometer was still up with the eagles. And so were we. There was no doubt about it. Hebridean magic was at work. Minds were working loose from their moorings, off on cruises of their own.
In the morning, Shorty motored out to get the shipping forecast on the VHF. NE, 4-5, said the confident coastguard voice. Not far above his head, small fairweather clouds were sliding briskly up from the south. There is a case for teaching meteorologists how to tell their left hand from their right. ("Right is painted green, yeah? And left is the red one. Now which is right?"
"Duh...red?"
"Omigod. Okay, read the forecast.")
A Mariner 6 outboard on a small boat is a noisy thing. But it can be a good companion on a twenty mile passage, particularly in regions where the bagpipe is the national instrument. First, you need to work out the scale, which is minor. Then you hunt for the good tunes. Among those recommended for use between Loch Scavaig and Mallaig are O Hear us when we Cry to Thee for those in Peril on the Sea, all Psalms, John Riley, My Town, most Chanties, Polly on the Shore, I pity the Poor Immigrant, John Barleycorn, the Devil among the Tailors (air), John Hardy, and actually just about anything else with John in the title. My log contains the names of sixty two songs sung that day.
Mallaig is a fishing port, out of which from time to time come evil tales of crushed boats and stolen outboards. These may apply if you slide alongside the fish quay in your Swan 47, cussing out wharf rats who fail to salute before hardening up your springs. In 21-foot open boats, we were greeted with courteous hospitality. A kind gent with earrings took the time to remove the freshwater hose from up the leg of his mate's oilskins, came down the buckled iron steps and took our lines. The net menders on the quay dispensed excellent information about gas, provisions and weather, needles flickering in the heavy twine. The telephones in the Seamen's Mission were clean and in working order. "Hoo big d'ye want your steaks?" said the small woman at the meat counter in the Stores.
"About the size of your hand," I said. I could not actually see them, but she was a small woman, after all. She came back from the scales. Her hands were the size of tennis rackets.
Staggering under steaks and lobsters and gas, we returned to the boats. The savage cutthroats on the quay helped us carry the water breakers, told us to take care on the broken step, and waved as we left. The tide bowled us up the Sound of Sleat past little coves where crofts with red iron roofs and mauve ponticum bushes stood over white sand beaches and granite-block quays. Billions of jellyfish pulsed along with us, heading solemnly towards Greenland.
In the middle of the Sound was the only other sail we saw all day. It belonged to an elderly and wild-eyed man in a gaff cutter, sailing round and round a rusty iron buoy half sunk in the tide. He came alongside, and spoke in a quiet, precise voice. "During the forty five minutes I have been watching this thing," he said, "it has moved one mile towards Mallaig. Against, you will have observed, the tide." Frankly, I did not believe him. We left him, still describing his slow circles. When we were uptide, too far uptide to go back, the doubts started to crowd in thick as the jellyfish. Admirals speak of underwater lights in the Sound of Sleat, for the submarines that manoeuvre there. A submarine, caught in one of those mighty nets they had been mending on the quay at Mallaig? Or...well, as the eagle flies we were no more than fifty miles from Loch Ness. This is the land of the each uisge, the water horse, long-maned plesiosaurs, left over through Hebridean magic from the Triassic -
"Rock!" yelled Shorty, pointing over his starboard bow at a pale patch in the black water.
It was not a rock. It was a clod of jellyfish, twenty feet across, perhaps a hundred feet deep. That night, heavy cloud came creeping in from the east, and the peaks withdrew behind dirty veils.
Kyle Rhea is the narrow gut that separates Skye from the mainland. In the approach, the hills close in on either side. The breeze has a downy softness, full of little whirls and eddies, each one the imprint of a rock on a mountainside. The tiller has a nervous tremor in the hand. Lucille is riding for the narrows on a glossy mound of water, dragged north by the moon, heeled to that strange breeze that flutters the luff of the jib like the jump of the muscles under a horse's hide. The world feels oddly...alive.
The shores draw together. They are shooting past. The numbers on the GPS say 13.8kt. A shoal of salmon crashes through the surface. There are a dozen seals in here, two porpoises, and - blast! whoooph! a long black back that can only be a pilot whale. I have tacked and gybed and tacked three times in quick succession, because I am in a whirlpool. We are all in our own separate whirlpools. There are rocks on the western side -
But there is no western side any more, because the Kyle has spat us out, and we are steady again, full and by on a firm breeze, in a tight cluster past Kyle of Lochalsh and out onto the Inner Sound. It is late. The sky begins to fade, a slow, misty fade, and the wind with it.
The Inner Sound is a dove-grey carpet. Ahead is Crowlin Island, said to be a useful anchorage. It looks more like a useless lump of rock to me. We drift towards it.
The evening is full of whale-breathing. Somewhere a loon is finding life most amusing. Seals are sleeping, noses in the air. We pass from boat to boat a bottle of Laphroaig, most marine of Islay malts, fire and iodine, peat smoke, sea wrack. A fishing boat girdled with tyres chugs home to Loch Alsh against a mountain of ponticum.
There is a line of slate grey across the water ahead. As we cross it, we are already scrambling for the weather rail, booting away the canapés. Whump comes the wind in the main. The wake begins to roar. Lash the tiller, work on the foredeck, jib drawing, bow bounding across the seas. Up that breeze goes. And here we are in these little boats on that big sheet of water, hauling down Crowlin Island and the night's anchorage.
Except that there is no sign of that damn anchorage.
Crowlin is a tough confection of pink granite and spring-green fern. The coast is iron-bound, shelterless. A headland comes up to port, with breakers on offlying skerries, and round the headland a bay. We run off into the bay, because that is what the pilot book says. Not wise. We are running onto a lee shore, lined with walls of rock.
Then the walls part like curtains. Suddenly we are in a channel, a cut straight in to the heart of the island. At its far end, further than the chart says is navigable, is a lagoon. The wind wails in the island's crags. The lagoon is like glass. We crawl into our tents, and into the sleeping bags, and sink into dreams of whales.
In the morning, the plains of heaven were thrashing with white water. We flogged south under jib and mizzen, wavetops coming green over the bow. Short's radio was lashed to the mast, swaddled in plastic. It did not like the mountains, hissing like a trampled cat. At nine-thirty, suddenly, a voice of great clarity emerged from the hiss. It said, "SE six to gale force eight," and disappeared again into the welter. No clues as to when or where.
So three hours later, the funeral of the much loved postman of Isleornsay was troubled at its sober fringes by four wild figures in red and yellow oilskins, lurching up from the sea and into the phone box. The sky was full of dirty cloud, and a stiff wind was ripping out of the south. The phone forecast was clear. By midnight, it would be blowing like hell, and by look of the Atlantic pressure map, there was no reason for it to stop blowing this year.
We left.
You do not want to hear about the next six hours, two and a half knots of tide on the nose, twenty knots of breeze thirty degrees on the starboard bow. My ancestors, once landed proprietors in Loch Nevis, sent into the narrowing Sound whirlpools and square waves the size of containers. To begin with I spoke kindly to them, begging them to cease and desist. After that I swore. Neither made a blind bit of difference. At 2100 hours, we turned east, into Arisaig harbour, our destination, and hoisted full sail for the last three miles. At the inshore end of the maze of skerries we tied up to a stout buoy, rafted together, and unleashed the Laphraoig. At one o'clock, the gale now screeching, we fell asleep. At two o'clock, we awoke. We had dragged the stout mooring buoy three quarters of a mile across the harbour, and landed in a thick pad of kelp on the fringe of some very sharp rocks.
At the start of the cruise, this would have seemed a disaster. Now, it was just a last kick of the old Hebridean magic. Laughing heartily, we clapped a rolling hitch on the buoy rope, hauled ourselves out in to enough water to start the outboards, and attached ourselves to the back end of the biggest trawler in the harbour.
And the next morning, battered, bruised, burned and exhausted, we pulled the boats out and headed south. We were talking twice too loud, the way you do when you have been communicating boat to boat without radio. It was raining. But the South Coast seemed more than ever like a main drain, and we were already making plans to come back. We had broken a lot better than even. In the face of that Hebridean magic, breaking even is doing very well indeed.
©Sam Llewellyn 1998
Sam Lewellyn