Portmahomack to Lossiemouth

 

Last hop. If I had left PM earlier, I'd have caught the tide at Lossiemouth - My last chance to get in would have been about 11:30 am.

Instead, I had to anchor off for a few hours and go in a little after five pm.

That's what the notch down towards Covsea is - I got in behind the Skerries near a sandy beach, packed up some stuff, got ready to tie up, and had a snooze. Snoozes rank highly among my sailing pass-times - a fact that is probably related to my failure to properly think about tide times.

The late entry meant that I only had one option for getting home on Friday night - a bus that left Lossiemouth at about 9:00 pm to get a train that arrived in Aberdeen at a quarter to midnight. Which was ten minutes after the last bus that could have taken me home.

A taxi would have been expensive, but acceptable. Except that there weren't any as it was Friday night, so I had to walk home, trailing my wheely bag.

Carrie came to meet me halfway. In case I was wandering aimlessly in a daze ... She would have given me a lift, but the car had a flat battery. A rare event, perfectly timed.

The next morning I spent some time getting the car started - this was a bit of a comedy involving a battery from the cellar that I thought was charged, some jump leads that didn't work (!), a neighbour, a battery charger, a prophylactic purchase of a new battery which had to be returned ... Oh, anyway. A return trip to Lossiemouth brought it all back into service.

Why did I go back to Lossiemouth?

To take the rest of my stuff off the boat. And to bring home the Aries.

I don't think I mentioned this, but early in the trip, I realised that the vertical bearing for the servo-paddle was a bit sticky, rendering the whole unit useless. I stared at it in resentment more than once while trying to fix the tiller pin problem off Fair Isle.

Anyone who has tried to remove an Aries unit from a floating boat will know the level of sheer incoherent bloody-minded determination this requires. This was amply supplied by my sense that the sooner I could get it fixed, the sooner I could forget how annoying it was carrying it around as deadweight for four weeks.

I also dropped one of the mounting bolts in the marina. It could, of course, have been much worse ...