We had left Gigha and we were sailing, we really wanted to sail as long as possible, after all the weather was lovely so why not. We were sailing slowly so at long last Beverley adjusted the halyard for the Genoa. We have a wrinkle in the Genoa that should not be there so she went forward and sweated the line and pulled the main sail up just a fraction.

While we were sailing we discussed one of the skills that you need to sail well and that is reading the sea.

• Looking for a change in the sea state, rougher water means more wind
• in a tidal area, rough water is faster water, while smooth water is upwellings

As we entered the area where we saw the rougher water, as predicted the wind speed was higher which meant that our speed increased, from 4.3 to 4.6. It takes a little bit of time for Salty Lass to accelerate, because we have her laden down with a lot of stuff, the only thing we were shy on was water, one of the reasons that we were going to Tayvallich.

While we were sailing we discussed points of sail, when we started sailing we were close hauled, but now we were on a close reach, which is just between close hauled and beam reach. As our point of sail had changed we had needed to alter our sail configuration a bit, so we bagged the Genoa a bit and moved the main, so that the leading edge of both sails were pointing into the wind. You need to do this so that the sail can act aerodynamically like a wing. When you are close hauled or in the close reach position then the sail is acting like a wing and is pulling the boat forward. After sailing in this configuration for some time, we then entered Loch Sween and we went for a run, this is a very dangerous point of sail, as you can very easily have a dangerous gybe in this configuration which is why Beverley fitted our Gybe preventer. It did mean that we could goose wing for a bit, which I love to see, although I was the one who poled out the Genoa. It was fun polling out the Genoa, but it is quite hard work. I didn't last long because we decided to change our configuration from a run to a training run so the Genoa went away and we sailed up the loch at an incredibly slow speed of 3.5 knots. As we were going down wind I had lots of gybing practice so I was pretty happy with that.

As we entered Tayvallich, it was time to put the sails down and navigate around the various obstacles

• Choosing the left most entrance, the right one is wider, but is shallower, so go between the buoys of the left channel
• Dogging the yachts, mooring balls and small island, makes it a tricky path to thread to get to the pontoon
• Avoiding the pontoon reserved for the water taxi - You can go there outside of taxi times, but we didn't know what they were
• Having fun and games on the short fingers of the pontoon, which is why the title of this blog is "We're gonna need a smaller boat!!!"

Realistically we were a wee bit tired, from the sailing so we messed up at the pontoon. It happens, so we decided to go to the mooring ball of our subscriber and rest. The next day however we were able to get water and fly the drone. I love drone footage.