The things we do for whisky

That was a truely awful trip, the forecast was NE 4 or 5 occassionally 6. What it should have said was NE 6, occassionally 5. Needless to say if it had said that we would have happily stayed and explored Rathlin. In the forecast for the Mull of Kintyre it just said 4 or 5, which I very much doubt is correct as it's only 15 miles away. So two sea area forecasts both of them wrong. Luckily for us Pixie is a solid old boat that could take anything the weather threw at her today, but there are many boats out there that couldn't.

Lulled into a false sense of security of the weather forecast we got up for a shower, only to find the harbour had a power cut. I thought it was just the pontoon that had been left powerless, but when the electronic lock on the showers showed no sign of life, we went back to Pixie and got ready to go. We left Rathlin at 8:30 to catch the last of the flood to clear Rathlin and the overfalls. once we cleared the south of the island we headed north into the wind which was a good force 5, but we were slowed down by the flood, this meant by the time we got to the overfalls the wind had increased and the tide was ebbing north over them. Wind against tide and overfalls are not the place for faint hearted, or us, but we were there and no one was going get us out of the situation we found ourselves in. The MacDonnell Race was as uncomfortable and confused. Walls of water the size of minibuses would march relentlessly towards us, waves were breaking around us, it wasn't a nice place to be. We were motorsailing into the wind, but the waves were too much to motor directly into them, so we had to tack out and back to make headway. This in turn took us longer than we had planned, so when we came to cross the traffic separation scheme (which we have to cross at right angles) the tide was running faster, and this took us much further west than we were hoping. All this mounted up to leave us almost directly down wind, and down tide from Islay in a force 6. It was a long rough slog up wind and our eta kept getting later and later. We were motor sailing in a steady 27 knots of true wind, making our apparent wind over 30 knots. The engine kept Pixie pointing closer to the wind and reduced the speed she lost as her bow pointed skywards, before parting the sea as she came down. Some of the waves were over 3 metres, the sort of wave that you get to the top of, not knowing what is on the other side of them. Most of the time there is just a hole that Pixie would fall into, pulling the helm would reduce the impact, but not reduce their size.

Our eta at Islay was 13:30 we finally got here at 15:30, two hours later than planned.

The entrance to Lagavulin bay is tight, in fact on our chartplotter the bay is made of red hatched lines, lines that are reserved for dangerous rocks. The entrance is less than 40ft wide and has rocks on either side. But once in it's perfectly sheltered.

We're currently on a mooring buoy less than 100 metres from Lagavulin Distillery. We went ashore and booked in for a tour and a warehouse tasting tomorrow. Then we walked around to the ruins of Dunyveg Castle which guards the entrance and was used by the Lords of the Isles around the 12th Century.





The wind has dropped right off and it's turning into a very plesant evening. We might even eat on deck tonight, if all the detritus surrounding me dries off in time.

We've arrived in Scotland at last. 18 days after leaving the Solent. Now we can begin to relax, and after a sail like today it hasn't come a minute too soon.