Tobermory to Mallaig

Finally the near gales became a forecast of  "only" force 6 gusts. SW'ly too hence not an ideal direction for going around the infamous Ardnamurchan point but better than it had been. We opted to head off a little later than optimal for the trip to Mallaig but more conducive to a good night's sleep.

As we prepared to leave Tobermory, it was raining. We could see the fog bank heading towards Ardnamurchan too. Yes, it was going to be a perfect trip. Here is the "pre mist / fog" view leaving the harbour:

Yup, unending grey. It got thicker and so our view of the beautiful islands etc became this one:

Rounding Ardnamurcahn was a bit lumpy with 1.5 m waves on the port bow but with a very short period (ie they were close together) and then building to more like a couple of metres. The stabilisers dealt with them OK, we just bobbed up and down a bit and got the anchor wet occasionally. Turning to head NE'ly to Mallaig things calmed down as we got into the lee of the Ardnamurchan peninsular but the visibility did not change unfortunately.

Here is the route to help you orientate things:

The rather large "wiggle" in the route that you can see is thanks to this fishing boat who was glared at by Patrick:

The fishermen were doing the usual thing of  having their AIS not transmitting so we tracked him by radar and then had a diversion across his stern:

The little green circles are how our Furuno plotters display the radar targets that it is tracking, you can also see the second one that we safely passed ahead of. We had a yacht without radar on the same track as us too - since the visibility was so poor we do wonder how they would have avoided the two fishing boats if their timing had taken them as close as ours would have.

The area has some wild depth variations too - 130 metres under our keel was plenty although a nearby bank took that down to 19 then back up to over 100:

Following the coast up to Mallaig we heard rather than saw the "Harry Potter" steam train that runs between Fort William and Mallaig with wild ticket prices for tourists. Here is the best picture we could manage, mainly of the smoke and condensation out of the funnel:

As we approached Mallaig entrance, a CalMac ferry was departing, and he also had no working AIS transmission. Maybe this is the Bermuda triangle for AIS signals? OK, maybe not, we are just trying to be kind. Having read about CalMac's maintenance issues (see earlier post) we are not really too surprised.

We popped onto the nice empty hammerhead berth we had been assigned and the crew had her small "32 amp moment" which cheered things up a lot. The trip was one of those gloomy, watching the radar not the lovely views events. Not too bumpy off Ardnamurchan and all OK once in the shelter of the land again. the boat behaved unlike the weather. It HAS to improve sometime soon, please....