A gap appeared in the cloud, so we cancelled what was to be a rainy day at anchor in Arsaig and headed off across the channel to Eigg.
We'd heard rumours about the locals on the Small Isles (which are principally Eigg, Rum, and Canna). Namely: they get up late, take a few minutes between being stand-offish and becoming your best friend, produce some amazing seafood meals, and like to party. With this in mind, I suggested we visit the tea room (which translates as pub/restaurant) in search of seafood.
Seafood-wise, we were disappointed. This was probably something to do with the chef who was remonstrating with a couple of other locals. The views out the front and the back doors were breathtaking though. The barman ticked one of the boxes; having presented us with a transport cafe quality menu and talking us quickly into two baked potatoes, he became increasingly chatty and asked us whether we were going to "the hall" later on. What's that? Oh, there's a festival there tonight. We finished our potatoes and headed up the hill.
There we discovered a gathering at a village hall. It was a mixture of locals and visitors from far and wide (aka London and Glasgow). There was dicussion of it being the 25th anniversary of the islanders buying out the previous landowner, which we initially thought was the reason for the festival. Eventually we figured out the festivial was organised by a local musician who performs as Pictish Trail, and found this set list:
If I hadn't told them already, a small handful of our readers would be having the same reaction as I did at the time. To whit: "That can't really can be Jon Hopkins, can it?" (spoiler: it was). For those of you not au fait with electronic music, you should know that he's Quite A Big Deal.
On with the show, Pictish Trail were good:
In comparsion, Makeness were a bit "meh". Jon Hopkins was awesome though.
We found out later that tickets for the festival were £80 each (whoops, sorry about that Mr Pictish), but there was absolutely no mention of who the "plus guests" were. So I guess we've been to one of those "secret gigs" now.
We'd not been expecting a late night, so of course it was low tide at 2am and I had to roll up my trousers to drag the dinghy away from the quay.
Later that day (!), we set off early for Canna to beat the wind. Normal service was resumed and we returned to lovely rural scenery.
We stayed in Canna for a couple of nights to let the wind blow through, then moved on to the Western Isles or Outer Hebrides. On the way, we had a dolphin treat:
Dolphins are a surprisingly common occurence when sailing UK waters. They love to swim off a yacht's bow and never fail to make a sailor smile. This meeting was particularly good, with dolphins coming from all directions for the best part of an hour.
Technical note: You may have noticed that the map below shows more of our journey. Thanks to the team at noforeignland, we can now import detailed tracks from Vagrant's TimeZero navigation software. You can now see everything from the start in Tréguier, June 2021.
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