Ardfern to Craobh

After a day of showers, then heavy duty rain, we were happy to awake to the expected sun and almost no wind. Our plan was to have a little run around the Craignish peninsular and up to Craobh where Sheila and Niall would join us for a catch up.

This involves going through the Dorus Mor, a nice area of confused seas in strong tides and winds. Well, the wind was not an issue and by timing the passage for just before slack water we avoided the worst of the whirlpools that like to spin you around for fun. In fact, we even managed to pick up a back eddy around the point to get some rocket assistance. It was a lovely calm passage:

As you can see, the route looks a bit like doing a U turn and the observant will spot a small diversion during that turn:

That is because some yotties think they have right of way even when motoring. That annoys us more than it should we guess......

Passing the entrance to Corryvreckan, it still looked quite benign:

but we were not tempted to test that out. Instead we just carried on up to Craobh where they struggled to hear our radio calls so we ended up phoning them. Onto a huge berth at the end of the marina, we found that we were just about visible on their webcam. Spot the Nordhavn game time: 

For some mad reason, we walked back to Ardfern during the afternoon, with a reasonable hill to manage in-between. That made us feel that we had deserved the cake and coffee at Lucy's cafe place that we rewarded ourselves with. Good carrot cake by the way, not the best ever but well up there....

The walk has some nice views over the water:

It also seems to be the home for elderly tractors:

that are still in use, just about:

and some that have breathed their last:

and just been dumped. 

During our last visit, several years ago, we found that the power supply on this pontoon was feeble. Sadly, nothing has changed. All the sockets were full, bar one that had an adapter hanging from it, leading to two pigtails. Yes, a 16 amp supply being split in two? Hobson's choice time so we plugged into one of them. As soon as any load went on the connection the voltage dropped rapidly (it had been down to  206v but we didn't get a picture in time!):

Not as bad as when we stayed here before when we got below 200v but....... 

Then a yacht arrived opposite and plugged into the second connector attached to the one 16 amp socket. This was never going to end well, we didn't know that we were suddenly sharing the outlet and something on the yacht must have kicked in as the pontoon trip went pop and we had to hastily turn off the dishwasher to save cremating our batteries and inverters. Luckily we were checking the shore supply regularly.  For an "up market" place, this has been an issue for far too long. They really have to sort out the lack of sockets and obvious issues with the cabling / capacity to E pontoon. Rant over. 

Well, maybe not as the following morning we dug out our huge extension cable so we could plug into a pylon thingy further away that had all 4 sockets free. We found out why they were free, none of those worked. We became used to resetting the trip on the power after that, even with our inverters limited to drawing 8 amps, hoping the guy on the yacht opposite would go home and stop making toast or whatever.

On a much happier note Sheila and Niall, the folks who live in Portavadie with stunning views down to Arran, arrived with their dog Penny for a visit. We managed a little wander, lots of catching up, and then a beautiful sunset:

 

The next morning we mentioned how good Lucy's the new cafe place in Ardfern is, so we planned coffee and cake. When we got there (around an hour's walk, some of it up some steep bits), they saw a sign outside saying "coffee from Argyll coffee roasters". They particularly like that, use it at home and the owner of the business is a neighbour of theirs. All was well until we went inside and the staff told us that their coffee machine was broken and that a man was coming from Glasgow that evening to try and fix it......... At least the cake and toast were good.

Walking back, the crew was leading and chatting. Our route follows what looks like a road but it becomes a track pretty soon after leaving Ardfern:

Somehow she was distracted enough to follow a wrong turning so we ended up doing a big loop towards the north east and ending up walking back to Craobh along the road. Naturally the road has no path alongside it but not much traffic either. It did help her rather a lot in her weekly step count challenge. We also met some nice looking locals:

Overnight it rained rather a lot. Guess what, the power tripped out and did so a few minutes after resetting it. There had been minimal load on the system (just powerng up the inverters and keeping the fridge / freezer going). This was ominous. When the captain unplugged the marina's splitter thing, water came out from the connectors. Brilliant. Just brilliant. Someone had taped up the cable entries with insulating tape - now we know why. So, the genset was called into action.

According to the marina manager, they cannot fit any more outlets as there is not enough power coming into the marina from the grid. Time that the marina operators spent some money to fix that, especially as the place is totally full this summer. Lovely spot, lovely people but the infrastructure....