Lochboisdale to Salen

The time had come. Yes, after a month enjoying the Outer Hebrides and with no sign of a nice settled spell in the weather forecasts, we decided that on a calmish day, we would head back to the mainland. The destination was Salen and the trip is about 62 nautical miles long. We'd had a day of gales then a day of strong winds from the south but that abated one evening and amazingly we only had a forecast of F4 SW'ly for the day ahead. Quite a treat really and there was enough time overnight for the waves to calm down a little too.

The plan was to leave around 8am, so we didn't set an alarm. You know how these things work - it was the one day when we keep sleeping until the crew woke up, saw the time and roused a reluctant captain.

Leaving Lochboisdale was kind of sad, we will miss the remoteness of the islands. You can see how remote as our AIS signals were not picked up by Marinetraffic until we got closer to the Summer Isles (the green ones below):

There is nobody picking up our transmissions towards the end of the route either, as we headed up Loch Sunart to Salen bay. This blue line shows the route we took:

which is around a 10 hour run. We try to put the international port codes into our AIS system as our destination. For example, Tobermory is GB TOB. Pretty self explanatory really. Salen is tiny and doesn't have a code so we entered it as free text. Marinetraffic interpreted that in a very strange way:

Yes, we were bound for Salten in Norway..........  Our navigation kit was not going there though and we enjoyed a fine day and gentle enough 1.5 metre waves on the starboard bow. All very civilised:

The depth sounder decided that it would take a little holiday again and fail to show any reading - we had the ominous three dashes:

However, we forgave it as we were in a pretty deep bit:

You can see the chart showed over 300 metres around us so we didn't feel too concerned about running aground. The real shame is that the direct course takes us rather a long way off the Small Islands (Egg, Rum, Muck, Canna) so the views of them were pretty remote:

Approaching the mainland we can add another lighthouse picture - Ardnamurchan:

We've mentioned before that this is one of those infamous headlands where it can get very rough very easily. Well, it wasn't. The roughest bit was going through the wake of the CalMac ferry that was heading out to Barra. We didn't have a sprig of lucky heather on the bow either to celebrate having gone round it and north earlier on - you were supposed to do so to in days gone by.

Instead we enjoyed the rock formations of the Ardnamurchan peninsular:

and after avoiding a crazy number of pot markers around the entrance, we enjoyed the spectacle of Loch Sunart which has some rather different housing along its' shores:

not to mention the grand views:

Having been "pre-allocated" a nice berth at Salen by the very helpful Jan, we duly berthed on their hammerhead, alongside Great Escape, a very swish Malo 43 owned by Robert and Deborah. Thanks to covid / sloth / various other excuses, we hadn't seen their new to them yacht or had a chance to drink their gin stocks. Luckily our proximity enabled that:

Salen is one of those happy places, especially if you arrive on a sunny and relatively calm day. Here is the view aft towards the head of the bay:

Not bad really. Think we will happily settle here for a little while, catch up with Robert and Deborah and do a few "little boat jobs"

Maintenance news:

Nope, nothing. the big Lugger engine was quite happy when checked after the run so we resisted the urge to fiddle with it. Lucky Lugger.