Mallaig to Kyle of Lochalsh

Since we were being evicted early on the Friday morning and the forecast still had SW'ly force 7 in it, we didn't bother to refit the bimini cover on the flybridge. Might have been a mistake if it was raining too (no surprise there) but we did manage to dodge the showers as we left. Left = got blown rapidly off the pontoon when we released the mooring lines. 

Heading out from Mallaig there were some chunky waves on the beam that kept the stabilisers very busy as the period (time between them) was around 3 seconds so they just kept grabbing at the boat. As we turned more to the north and got a little bit of shelter from Skye things calmed down nicely despite the 35 knot gusts. The route is one of those stunningly beautiful ones:

You trek up between Skye and the mainland with the narrows at Kyle Rhea being particulalrly nice despite the strong tides that run through it.  We needed to time our arrival there for more or less slack water which meant a slow run up at a lower cruise rpm than normal. The wind and rain kept going so we just sat in the pilothouse and drank tea. You know when the crew has the kettle on:

104 amps output from the domestic alternator at 24v DC - most of it is being used by the inverters to create the AC power that the electric kettle needs. Normally, when we are underway with the navigation gear powered up, engine room fans etc all running we consume way fewer amps:

That goes up a little at night with the navigation lights and FLIR working to the mid 30s.

Slowly, the weather looked like it might improve. A comment was made by the presenter on a Radio 4 program that whilst the south was enjoying sun and light winds things were a "bit colder and wetter" in Scotland and that "Skye will get sun at 12am, but maybe only for a minute". He was pretty accurate. Here is the first hole in the clouds: 

but approaching the narrows, normal service was resumed:

We were a little early arriving there so had to push a little bit of tide then got rocket assistance leaving the area, all in the driving rain so no nice pictures for you, sorry.  We did get the little ferry loading up which crosses to and from Skye, often diagonally as it fights the current trying to push it the wrong way:

You can see the turntable on it,  which is very rare, the cars are spun around ready to drive off at the other end as the ferry is not "roll on, roll off":

As we entered the lovely Loch Alsh, there was more rain and a fish farm ship that was just pottering about in circles making avoiding him interesting. We hoped to stop on the community pontoon at Kyle of Lochalsh and saw on AIS that one motor cruiser had stopped there briefly before continuing his trip towards us and through Kyle Rhea heading south, So, we hoped that there would be one space large enough and that the wind would drop and change direction as per the forecast. Otherwise the pontoons are very exposed and would be untenable. The backup plan was to continue to Plockton and anchor off there.

We really did not need to worry - the pontoons were totally empty, probably thanks to the strong SW / W winds of the last three days which let waves break right over them. Things were way calmer when we arrived and the forecast had the wind turning northerly, meaning we would be perfectly sheltered by the land.

The infrastructure looked very neglected. No water, no power (neither mattered much to us) and part of the structure missing. It seems that the community trust who run it are not too focussed on attracting visiting boats anymore. Their payment system at the top of the walkway didn't work and they don't answer the phone either. It looks like this little facility is doomed, which is a huge pity.

Maintenance news:

We had some fun with the depth sounder. For no obvious reason when we were in over 100m of water, the depth readings just showed three dashes - ie no data being recieved. The captain tinkered with the settings to change the input from the little Airmar sensor that does depth and speed to the Furuno fish finder. That didn't work either. Then the Airmar sounder vanished from the list of available inputs. A reboot of the nav system and the NMEA converters, reset the input to the Airmar device which was visible again and all was well:

We were back in 136m of water. No idea what happened, it seemed as though the NMEA2000 network link to the sounder had failed, but the rest of the devices on that were all working OK. All most strange. We need to check the fish finder though as it is not working properly any more. It gets used so infrequently (to show the profile of the sea bed from time to time) so we don't know when it decided to opt out from life.