We were once again in Craobh, a nice enough marina, but realistically there is not much to do. The shop is really tiny and it is miles from any where, so it was a good thing that we were going that day.
We had not been going long when a fishing vessel swerved to go in front of us dumping pots while he went. It was ridiculous, firstly because he had to manoeuvre to go in front of us, and it would of actually taken less effort to go astern of us, but it was also ridiculous because of the dumping of pots. Each pot was tied by a line to a buoy, so we literally had two lines right in front of us. Luckily we were motoring so we quickly stopped Salty Lass, we could then see where the buoys attached to the pots were, so we simply turned Salty Lass slightly so that the port that had been thrown directly in front of us went down the starboard side. As you can imagine Beverley was ticked off, in fact she was more than ticked off she wanted to say some words.
We were still near the bottom of Luing island when a yacht came onto our port side, he was transmitting his AIS position and we were going to have a very close encounter, because he was going to come onto our port side, we were the stand in vessel while he was the give way vessel, so he should of made a course correction so that he went astern of us. From what we could see he was not doing that so we accelerated so that we could avoid a collision. The AIS said that by increasing our speed that we went from a closest approach of 10 m to 100m which was fine. It had been the second time in an hour where the other boat should of tried to avoid us, but they didn't. Now according to the Yacht master book, regardless of who should avoid the collision, if you can avoid a collision then you do so.
We continued down the sound of Jura motoring our speed as we went, soon we were in the acceleration zone which is just after the Gulf of Corryvreckan. We looked at our speed as we went through the smooth sea state and the disturbed water. The smooth water was caused by up wellings and reduced the speed of Salty Lass, while the disturbed water was where there was a lot more energy and we went faster in these areas, our top speed through the race was over 11knots and Beverley likened the experience to riding the rocket.
After the race the wind increased and we could at last put our sails up. Beverley and I both love sailing and there is something really great about having the sails up. Freedom, serenity and just a total feeling of being at one with nature.
The sailing didn't last for long, but only because we were soon at our destination of Craighouse. We arrived on a Sunday and although we did walk around Craighouse a bit, the shops were closed, but there was a bar open along with an ice cream parlour, so we had an ice cream while we had a little look around. After the look we took Salty Lass over to the anchorage and although there were patches of sand, for the most part it was a kelp forest, but one particular seaweed was striking because it was such a vibrant green. The next day I had hoped to explore Craighouse again, but the sea state was quite bouncy and we were on high tide and we had already seen 0.8m on the depth guage, Far too shallow for comfort so we decided to move Salty Lass.
Our first thought was to leave Craighouse and continue our journey, but Beverley was on the helm and I was getting tossed about in the cockpit. The sea state was really rough, it was a shame we did not have a camera rolling but trust me on this it was bad, so when Beverley decided to head in I was really glad to return. This time we went for the anchorage, but seeing as we knew where the sand patches were we picked one of these behind the protection of an island. The anchorage was still quite swelly which is why we got our lee sheets out, but we did mange to get some sleep.
The next day it was calm so we decided to go to Port Ellen, it was a motor with the Genoa helping in some areas, but mainly it was motor. The most interesting thing about the trip was the huge breakers that we saw on some of the rocks.
When we arrived we went onto a starboard pontoon, as the wind was supposed to be coming from our starboard side but it actually came from our port side so we moved Salty Lass on ropes across the berth. I had a minor hazard during the operation in that my hat went over my eyes, but we did manage it.
