We've made it to the Outer Hebrides. While the rest of the UK sweltered and melted, the weather in the Western Iles has been grey, windy, and often wet. Team Vagrant has had to hide from a series of lows, each bringing a couple of days of strong South Westerlies. But it's still a beautiful place to be.
After sitting out the wind in a bay on the north of Vatresay, we pulled into the useful mini-marina in Castle Bay, Barra for a few days.
This is where the name comes from:
We stayed in another anchorage on Barra, then moved north to South Uist ("you-ist", Old Norse for "West"). We set Vagrant up in a sheltered bay going by the name of Wizard Pool. The only problem was the 600m mound of Hecla to the south of us. Steep hills don't block the wind as well as you might think; instead they can accelerate it and make it gusty. We sat out the night there with a constant wind of over 30 knots, and gusts of nearly 50. Safe enough - it's not usually wind you need to worry about, but waves and we we're very protected from them, but we'd have been happier a few bays across.
On again, to Lochmaddy, North Uist. There were occasional breaks in the cloud.
A small boat approached us one evening with a man and two children. He offered us some mackerel. "Sure" we said, "how much do we owe you?", but he wouldn't take any payment. It turns out he comes from Uist, but now works for Amazon in the US and visits on holiday. He'd even headed and gutted them for us.
These posts, interests, stories, sites, photos, and insights are fantastic. Please keep them coming. Imagining it's Sara doing the publishing with filtering of Phil's snide and clever interpretations of it all.
ReplyDeleteNot sure about clever, but yes, that's about right.
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