Laggan to Dochgarroch

Moondog
Brian Whitefoot
Wed 6 May 2015 09:05

This was a day of surprisingly good progress. The esteemed weather forecasters were predicting all sorts of wind and rain mayhem for later in the afternoon, and we set Fort Augustus as our goal, at the southern end of Loch Ness. Even Bez with his 40,000 delivery trip miles shared the view that it did not look like we would be sailing up Loch Ness today.

We made good time to Fort Augustus and were there around lunchtime, to find rather grey but otherwise benign weather. Now the ‘forecast’ had changed to show a rather quiet and pleasant afternoon and early evening. A complete U turn, of a type normally reserved for certain politicians, and another example of the limitations of weather forecasting. Frankly, it is not difficult to forecast something when you are actually inside the forecast period...a few well placed informants phoning in to the weather service is all you need.

On the positive side it meant that if we could get down the flight of locks here we would be able to travel the 20 mile length of Loch Ness and moor up on the outskirts of Inverness....which we duly did. We even tried to sail for a while without engine on the Loch, to give Dick a real taste for tacking upwind . Enthusiasm for this waned quickly , since the wind was very light, and what there was tended to be swirling all over the place, with an average direction from dead ahead. Since we had no more locks or bridges to negotiate to our mooring in the canal at the north end of the Loch, we could have spent all night doing this, but opted instead for the four hour version of the trip under engine.

Overall, a day of surprising progress.

 

Bogdan’s Blog

Chips !!!

I have discovered chips...and no longer need to search for scorpions. I could live on chips !

This was shaping up to be another tedious day on this canal, with ropes and freezing cold. And then they all disappeared when we tied up at Fort Augustus to ‘get supplies’. But only two came back, which seemed careless...didn’t they agree which one was on look out duty?

With one man down we were then into  lots of frantic rope work because it transpired that we had been summoned into the locks to make our way down to Loch Ness...but where was Dick ? Then he appeared with a huge bag of fish and chips. Brilliant timing, since it was all hands to casting off and managing ropes...whilst eating fish and chips.  Many difficult decisions over the next half hour as the crew struggled with prioritising the competing demands of ropes and eating chips. Since they were fairly rubbish at ropes, but seemed very good at chips, they generally focused on chip consumption.

However, plenty of chips left, and I had a good feast. Perfection would be chips with tempura scorpion...I am going to have to get included in the ordering next time.

 


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