Kyle of Lochalsh to Stornoway (Isle of Lewis)

After a few days of strong northerly winds, things were forecast to calm down. Finally! May has been truly grim so far. Here is a wave height prediction from Windy:

The nice blue colours meant predicted wave heights of around a metre - you can see one example shown with the little "flag" in the picture. This is in comparison to over 3m waves in the preceeding days. Finallly winds of only up to force 5 were predicted. Wow.  We forgave the cold temperatures just to get rid of the horrid winds that have plagued us for most of May. 

Timing for a trip to Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides was tricky, the optimum for the tides was to leave at a really silly time so we opted to go for a daybreak departure instead. Remember that this far north, daybreak is pretty early though. Stupidly so really. As an example, back in Southampton, near our house, nautical twilight starts at 04:15am whereas in the Kyle of Lochalsh it is at 03:36am, In Stornoway, around 55 nautical miles further north, it starts another 9 minutes earlier. This suggested a very early alarm call. 

We duly endured a 3am alarm, got ourselves and the boat ready and headed off half an hour later. This is how the elegant Skye bridge looks at 3:30 am:

and this is how the FLIR sees it:

We had the FLIR on although you could just about see things since it is much better at picking up pot markers than the naked eye in poor light conditions. The recently constructed and ugly fish farm pier and buildings looked no nicer in the half light and still spoil the area:

To prove just how much things had settled down, here is the wind strength as we headed under the bridge and pointed north again:

A whole 4.7 knots, About 30 lower than a couple of days ago. We enjoyed this treat rather a lot. The route is pretty simple to follow, you can see just how far north Stornoway is compared to the "end" of the Scottish mainland:

Once clear of the Isle of Skye we had the predicted swell left from the earlier winds more or less on the nose but as it was swell, with a nice long wavelength you really didn't notice it - only up to about a metre and an half  in height anyway. The grey gloom lifted slowly as we approached Stornoway and some of that rare commodity, the sun, peeped out. Oh yes, life was looking up.

One pesky fishing boat kept on altering course in front of us then going in circles so the crew, who was on watch at the time, had to keep changing our course to avoid him. She was far from amused at his antics.  We did see several puffins to cheer her up though, but of course they dived down as we got too close to them, so sadly no pics.

Approaching Stornoway we needed to slow down a little to let the big CalMac ferry Loch Seaforth enter and berth ahead of us. We called the harbour folks who gave us a berth on a finger pontoon which we guessed would be a bit of a squeeze but so be it. Just to spoil things, our liner curse continued and multiplied. The "thing" that was anchored off the Kyle of Lochalsh was anchored here too:

and the tenders, driven by the same dodgy crew presumably, were shuttling the American tourists ashore. In fact we were doubly blessed, another cruise ship was laying alongside the quay:

making a walk into town less appealing.

Heading for the inner harbour area we were called on the VHF asking if we wanted a berth. We explained that we'd already had a chat and got one. Then they called again and gave us a better, simpler alongside berth after they had seen the Nordhavn trundling in. We must look more imposing than we really are.  It was another one of those "got to spin the boat and back onto this spot with no thruster use" moments as the nearby yachts were more than a little interested in our arrival.

The harbour guy arrived, apologised for not being there to take our lines (wow!), delivered an information pack and had a long chat about where to go in town, what had changed since our last visit and life in general. So like the treatment in the south coast of England harbours!!! His welcome alone reminded us why we fell in love with these islands 6 years ago. Such friendly helpful people.

After a clean up for ourselves, we did brave the town and the huge camera toting cruise ship folks. Why do they always look so miserable?

Maintenance news:

The depth sounder took another holiday on this trip. Only it clearly was not the NMEA2000 network connection that failed as we still had a speed over the ground showing. (For the non boating folks, the sensor sends both speed and depth to our systems via one network connection) Perhaps the sender is struggling with very deep bits as we were in 140m of water or thereabouts. The older Furuno sender used to fail at around 120m but the newer Airmar used to be happy in all sorts of depths. Will keep an eye on it and if it is depth related, it might be as simple as a clean up. You never know....