Loch Shieldaig to Stornoway (Isle of Lewis)

The weather forecast was getting a little worse for a trip over to the Outer Hebrides. The winds were staying NE'ly and that means sort of "on the beam" for a run across to Stornoway. The increase to force 5 in quite an exposed area was going to start pulling up some bigger waves - the wind had been from that direction for about 3 days already. So, we opted to leave the storm-proof buoy mooring in Loch Sheildaig at stupid o'clock and head over to the island of Lewis. Shame as the area was kind of nice:

After ridding ourselves of the half ton of mooring hawser, we had a tough navigational challenge ahead:  get out of the loch avoiding a couple of rocks and then point the boat at Stornoway:

The trip was nice and quiet to start with, then the fishing boat quantities built up as we approached the Shiant bank:

All those little green triangles kept changing course and teasing us of course. As we got further away from the mainland, so the NE'ly wind was building up some bigger waves on the beam so the newly fettled stabilisers got some exercise. We lived with the loss of about 0.2 knots speed loss that caused for the comfort of a nice upright trip, allowing important things like tea production to continue. The waves started to calm down as we got into the shelter of the island but the nice AIS system told us that we were going to arrive in the harbour entrance at exactly the same time as the incoming Calmac ferry:

As he was bigger, faster and scarier than us, we waived the "overtaking vessels give way" rule thingy and did a little loop around, following him into the harbour. So, for anyone who was closely stalking us by AIS, it was not a big autopilot failure, local magnetic anomaly or drunken crew. It was just self preservation.

Entering Stornoway you call the harbour control at Arnish Point:

and get a non-committal "carry on we will try to find a spot for you" kind of reply. Well, they did. It was truly a spot - a tiny finger berth that required squeezing between two pontoons and then backing onto the finger in the wind. The finger only came as far as the pilothouse door so getting the bow properly secured was going to be great fun. The harbour man saw this and figured out that it was not an ideal spot for us, so we wriggled our way out and then onto the walkway between another pair of closely spaced pontoons. Much better spot. The harbour man said that he was "just giving us a boat parking test" and that we had passed.  (It had been one of those "I refuse to use the thrusters and cheat" manoeuvres as there were plenty of yotties watching and eagerly awaiting the inevitable crunching noises as a lumbering big old Nordhavn tried to pirouette around.)

If you were one of them, sorry to have disappointed you.

Numbers and maintenance:

The trip took us just under 7 hours at our "economical cruise" rpm of 1475. That equated to a slow 6.2 knots through the water though - still heavy with fuel and stores plus a lovely coat of weedy grassy stuff on the hull courtesy of the sun and clear waters we've had recently. Sounds like the next maintenance job is launching the RIB and giving the accessible bits of the hull a scrub. Wonderful.