Day 43 -Thursday 30th June. Whitehills to Peterhead.

Left Whitehills at 8.15 this morning in the company of Kelvin in his Sadler 26 called Gil-Galad. the conditions were perfect. The sun was shining, the wind was a force3/4 from the west and off we tramped.Kelvin started out with only his jib and I pulled away from him quite quickly.

The radio was concentrating on 3 stories. Murray is in the Wimbledon semis against Nadal tomorrow. The public sector are on strike today and they had to close a power station at Torness because of jellyfish blocking the filters in the water cooling system. My thoughts were with the public sector workers fighting for their pensions.As I will be collecting mine when i get back it seemed pretty close to me.

There was a lot of bird life today. The rocks were covered in bird colonies. There were big groups feeding at sea and downy guillemot youngsters were bobbing about and vulnerable. They didn't seem to be able to dive like the adults and so sat around screaming when I passed by too close.They seem such easy targets for the gulls.

One of the little ports I passed was Pennan, where they filmed Local Hero. Its still got the red telephone box which features in the film though I couldn't see it from the shore.

I imagined Rattray Head to be cliffs like most headlands, but its just a series of sand dunes. It is the shallow water off it which causes the bad conditions as the tide can kick up a bad swell. Today it was no problem and I just coasted through.

Just beyond Rattray there is a gas terminal and the charts show all the pipelines that come ashore at that point. Probably not a good place to try and anchor!

Peterhead is a very major port with the marina tucked in the corner. When I radioed in to enter the marina I had a polite ticking off for not having asked a mile out to enter the harbour. I checked the pilot book and it says as much there but I missed it.I felt a little small and entered my berth with my tail between my legs.

A friendly Dane took my line as I came in and got talking . He invited me to joining the crew for a can of Carlesburg. There are 40 boats on there way over from Denmark and they are all going to try and fit in Whitehills. Its such a small place they'll need a stacking system.The skipper was thinking about going through the canal and heading down the Irish sea to do a partial circumnavigation. He has 6 weeks. I said he should be able to do it in his very flash Walstead 42.

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kelvin finally arrived nearly 2 hours after me. It had taken me 7 1/2 hours to do the 40km so doing it in 2 hours less than the Sadler made me feel pretty good at how well Hylje had gone. I had poled out the genoa and raised the no2 jib as well as the main so she had lots of sail.

The latest progress map looks like this. Tomorrow I shall use these good winds to move onto Stonehaven or Aberdeen.Tonight though Kelvin and I will go looking for fish and chips. i shall try  not to comment on the speed of Sadler 26s.

Day 42- Wednesday 29th June Findochty to Whitehills.

My next challenge is Rattary Head and I need to catch the tide right as I  turn this corner and starting to head south. I have come a little further east along the Moray Firth to Whitehills to reduce the distance to this headland. Today was a relatively short sail as I brace myself for this unpredictable bit of coastline.It will be strange going south, as all my charts will now be effectively upside down, as I will be progressing down them rather than up them.


Just before Whitehills I passed the small harbour of Portsoy .There is a festival of sail event going on a there this weekend. It looks like such a small place from the sea and its hard to see how it can host such a big event. Its a shame I won't be around to see all the classic boats which will be there,

I was frustrated by the lack of Internet access last night and needed to find somewhere where I could reassemble myself and sort out my pile of washing and resolve my email problems. The little marina at Whitehills seemed the right place.

The marina is yet another former fishing port that has opened itself up to leisure boats. However, this one is privately owned by the local community and they have taken a pride in making it one of the nicest marinas on the east coast. The harbour master is extremely friendly and they have created a kitchen and sitting area complete with books and a sofa. One of the harbour commissioners gave me a lift into Banf to get some cash. He showed me the grand house, which used to be owned by the Duff family who gave their name to the adjoining town of Macduff. He also gave me a tour of the harbours of both towns and showed me where there is some still very significant ship repair work still going on. The major work in the area is now  associated with the oil rigs in and around Aberdeen.

There were big shoals of sand-eels in the clear water next to the pontoons. These were swimming amongst the jelly fish. They have not come out very well on the photo, but it was an impressively large amount of fish.On the radio this morning they were talking about the impending major collapse of marine life as a result of overfishing. I passed 3 trawlers very close this morning with their long lines trailing out behind them. The programme was talking of the resilience of the sea and the need to hold back to let stocks recover. It seems a big ask in a place like this. No matter how much the industry has collapsed how do you get fisherman to hold back in this way?


Alongside me on the pontoon is another single handed yachtsman doing the circumnavigation. He set out from Fareham a couple of weeks before me and has been around Cape Wrath. We compared experiences in the pub this evening and had a good natter to the locals.I think we will wet off together tomorrow, which will be good.

The high seems to be lingering a little longer and its making for some fantastic skies in the evenings.

Day 41-Tuesday 28th June Findhorn to Findochty

There was no internet signal last night, so I have had to wait until today to catch up.We seem to be having one of those " transient highs" in the Moray Firth and on my last night in Findhorn there was another lovely sunset. It didn't always result in next day being dry, but the pressure is holding up.

 The day started with clear blue skies. I motored past the sand dunes and it seemed I could have been in the Mediterranean. There was very little wind to start with and it was  coming from the west so would be behind me. I was looking forward to crossing Spey Bay because there is a resident school of Bottlenose dolphins there, but it seems they were off somewhere else.I didn't see a single fin.

If there were few planes flying out of RAF Kinloss, there was no shortage around Lossiemouth. The RAF airfield is just behind the dunes and some pilots seemed to be practicing taking off and landing. It was like having my very own display. As the winds were so light I experimented with poling out the genoa and then raising the no.2 jib as well. I then thought it would be a good opportunity to put up the spinnaker. As soon as it was up the wind started to turn so down it came again. The wind swung through 180 degrees and strengthened a bit. The forecast had said nothing about it coming form the east.It meant I now had to motor sail, so I wouldn't get so far today.

It meant that I needed to revise my destination.I chose Findochty, which the pilot book described as an "attractive village of brightly painted cottages..and..once a smugglers' paradise". The pilot book is seldom so glowing, so I thought it was worth trying.It was an attractive harbour and I moored alongside the harbour wall. The houses were all of a very similar design to the ones I had seen in the older part of Findhorn. It seems as if these places were built for the fisherman and I wondered how this had been organised back then.

 I met another couple of travellers again in a Colvic 26 and also retired geography teachers. As we compared places we had stayed over a glass of wine we were entertained by the local teenagers tombstoning off the harbour wall. They had stayed in Lossiemouth marina the night before and seemed to have met the lone sailor in the 17ft Pirate I met in the Caledonian. Looks like he's caught up and overtaken me.

There was hardly any Internet signal in the harbour and the local pub landlord looked like I was asking for some strange English ale when I asked him if he had wifi. His pub seemed to have been formed by joining 2 semis together. It's right next to a camp site at the back of the beach, so is quite popular.

What little signal I had was showing me that when I tried to send an email it put it into the draft box instead of sending it out, so I apologise through this blog to all those who aren't getting any replies from me.

As well as looking at boat names I like looking at house names too. This one was actually a B+B, but it seems like they've started downsizing!

The progress of my journey now looks like this.

Day 40-Monday 27th June.- Findhorn.

Today was all about the Findhorn Foundation and trying to come to a view about the place. Firstly though, I looked around the village. It has a strong architectural style of single storey former fisherman's cottages. They are tightly packed like the sardines they probably caught,They used to have no garden boundaries and it was unclear which were fronts and which were backs.This must have made for, and been reflective of, a close community and something of this is retained, despite the fishermen having long since gone.

Where the houses have been extended it seems to have happened in  sensitive and interesting ways.

The influence of the Foundation extends into the village, as it runs the local well regarded bakery and adjoining cafe.This served great coffee.

The foundation was established by Peter and Eileen Caddy, plus his secretary Dorothy Maclean in the late 50s. It started with Peter and Eileen moving onto the caravan site at Findhorn. He was an ex RAF pilot who had gone into catering, but was now out of work.Eileen was formerly married to a more high ranking officer and left 5 kids to be with Peter. They settled on the caravan site and started to put down roots in more ways than one.She spent a lot of time meditating in the toilet block in order to find some peace away from her 3 new kids. She was soon telling Peter that it would be a good place to grow vegetables and they were soon growing 2ft cabbages.She put their success down to earth energy and soon the neighbours were talking and people started visiting.At some stage Dorothy built an extension onto the caravan to live in.The original caravan and its extension are in their original location.

The vision statement of Findhorn says that it is a "spiritual community, Eco-village and international centre for holistic education helping to unfold a new human consciousness and create a positive and sustainable future". There are about 250 people who live on the site in a range of types of accommodation. There are mobile homes and chalets but the grandest ones are houses within the Field of Dreams, where people have built their own properties.

I felt that the character within the park had a very strong resemblance to the main village. The closeness of the houses, the small plots and the sense of community seemed much the same. I don't know whether this was the original intention or a happy accident, but it works in a campus sort of way.

The founders needed to build meeting places for visitors and for people who were now living on the site to join them.A community hall followed by a universal hall followed. These have been built with volunteer labour and much skill and creativity. I particularly liked the stone work, which has been built without mortar.

There is also now an arts centre and it was featuring a photography exhibition by Edwin Smith who left a legacy of over 60,000 photos of buildings, which are now held by the Royal Institute of British Architects.I particularly liked one of a farmstead in Deptford, Wiltshire taken in the mid fifties.

Another impressive building was the nature centre.It had a calm space inside.

I joined the guided walk, which took about 2 hours. The guide was happy to field any and every question as best he could. It was clear though with such a disparate range of movements and interests encompassed by the place it was difficult to know about everything. It was clear there was a heavy reliance on volunteer labour from the people who stayed for taster weeks.Much work was paid for with just a meal ticket. It was also the case that the resident population was weighted to the over 40s and that it had not served the Foundation well to sell off the housing plots freehold. This had led to an expensive range of properties and some of these were disproportionately large. Planning permission for a further 300 dwellings within the dune land had been given but it was not clear what sort of model would be used to ensure these would  remain affordable and helped re balance the stock.

Overall, it was hard not to like the place. I may have dwelt on the physical aspects of the built form, but these demonstrated the abundance of innovation, creativity, energy and vision around the place.Whilst its origins were about the particular earth energy of this corner of The Moray Firth it has become a spiritual centre and focus for the wider alternative view of how our lives should be run. It says it is a place for experimentation and like all experiments some can be more successful than others.It seems to me that it is good that such a place exists to ensure like minded people can came together. I could be critical about aspects of it and its shortcomings but this seems petty, when it is a force for such good thinking about how we should relate to nature and each other.I am glad I stayed a while to engage with it. I know I have only skimmed the surface, but I can not spare the time to do more than this. the place was set up by people who arrived with no visionary zeal. They just did what seemed right at the time. This chimed with others and continues to do so.

The site adjoins RAF Kinloss, where the peace and tranquility is blasted away when the Tornados take off, The Nimrods have now been removed and the site is closing down. Overall this is seen as a good thing within the foundation .However, there has been a strong  and unlikely symbiotic relationship between the two sites. The attraction between Eileen and Peter seems to have been echoed down the years. There have been many relationships formed beween Pilots and women visiting the Foundation. Crawford spoke about the stereotypical german women who found Englishmen a refreshing cange from the more domineering german males. All this will change when the pilots move to Culdrose or wherever.

Day 39- Sunday 26th June Inverness to Findhorn

Now I'm a pretty regular guy and if I can get off the boat at the beginning of the day and not have to use my Visa Potty 168, then the whole world seems a better place. The marina at Inverness hasn't really happened yet . The pontoons are in but the ubiquitous apartments, shops and bar are still just drawings. The toilets and showers are in portacabins. However, they are adequate and clean and they are better than my facilities.

walking through the pontoons I like to look at the boat names and ponder on the thinking of the person who named it. There is considerable thought that goes into this as people who've done it have testified. I think this one just has to be owned by a dentist.

Joan and Joe saw me off from the marina this morning when I left at 8.00. Joe took a photo and said he would email it to me. I was expecting southerly winds but they didn't arrive until later in the day so I mostly motored to Findhorn, which is about 24nm east of Inverness.The sea was dead flat calm and it rained for most of the way. It was not as bleak as it sounds because there was quite a bit to see, apart from when i could see virtually nothing at all.The radio was talking about the rest of the county having to cope with temperatures in the 30s and my thermometer was saying 14.5 degrees!

As you reach the Inverness harbour limits the Inverness Firth narrows between Chanory Ness and  Fort George. Its an impressively large fort with not much showing above its steep walls other than the roofs of the buildings within.

Just beyond the fort is White Ness Sand and I counted 88 seals hauled out on the sand bank. There were also several in the water. As always they were curious but kept their distance.Heavy rain always seems to have a flattening effect on the sea and each rain drop seemed to bounce on the surface. I was listening to radio Scotland through my earphones off my smart phone at the time.It was a programme called Out of Doors and they were visiting less visited areas of Scotland.They were in Fife, which is an area I will be going through. What was strange though was that they were in hail off Bass Rock and so I had the sound of hard rain in my ear phones whilst it was pelting down around me-a strange sensation.

The rain slowly cleared and the sea remained flat. It is difficult to get a sense of movement in those conditions if you do not look backwards to see the wake. The sea is more like sheet metal foil than water. The sea birds are very conspicuous as well and there were now razorbills as well as the guillemots and gannets.Razorbills are a bit smaller than guillemots and their bills look like they have been designed by a graphics artist. It feeds on small fish especially sand eels.Feeding frenzy flocks of  sea birds tend to form around shoals of sand-eels. I know that whales can also be seen when such commotion is going on. In such stillness I hoped to see the fins of dolphins, but not today. It was also far too shallow for whales

I had asked my sister if there was anyone who she knew at Findhorn who might show me around. Susan and Crawford had kindly taken up the challenge and they phoned me as I was finding my way in. Findhorn has a very shallow entrance which dries in Spring tides. Fortunately it was neaps but I was arriving at nearly low water. the minimum I saw was 1.4m. The size of the seal colony here dwarfed the one I'd seen earlier.

They have recently built some pontoons next to the Captain's table restaurant, and someone moved a small rib so I could get on to it.

Susan and Crawford met me there for coffee and then took me on a quick tour of the village, the Findhorn Foundation, the nearby town of Forres and up to Califer Hill for a panoramic view of the Moray Firth. The view of the Findhorn harbour showed what a small and shallow place it is.

My sister and Joan and Joe all said they would be interested to hear what I have to say about Findhorn, so I am going to spend some time tomorrow coming to an opinion. It's a bit like the alternative side of Totnes at first impressions. But I'm going to need to be more considered than that. Joan and I had both heard Satish Kumar talking about the Big Society on radio 4 and how Cameron's ideas compared with Shumaker's. They gave a clip of Shumaker speaking at Findorn, so there are more than superficial connections between Totnes/Dartingto and Findhorn.

Susan and Crawford invited me to dinner and I benefited from their long association with the Foundation. Crawford had come here about 20 years ago.He became disillusioned with the place within 3 months. He now considers himself to be a dispassionate observer. He has has been moved by the magical but fleeting moments when people have come together and created incredible atmospheres but he has also seen the sleazy sexual  predation on naive and vulnerable women and the blatant commercialisation. I think I got a both ends of the spectrum view from the 2 of them.

Their recent story is that a couple of years ago they had sold up everything and loaded it into a van to drive to the Sierra Nevada in Spain to make a rock cave home that some people seem to be doing out there. A tyre burst on the motorway and their possessions were strewn all over. They escaped without physical harm but it has taken until now to recover from the experience. Prior to the accident Crawford had told Susan that he had dreaded something like this happening. You may call this a premonition or say that his fears created the situation. Alternatively, it may have just been an accident and a coincidental set of thoughts. However, having had the worst of your fears realised but escaped then everything is up from there. They are happy and back in their rented house. She is a ghost writer for a food/health/natural cosmetics producer. He helps make bio fuel from spent chip oil and has not been to a filling station in 6 years.It was a great evening and I cycled back into a glorious sunset at 10.30 pondering on the nature of spiritualism.

Susan had said that she saw an openness and sparkle in my eyes that probabaly comes from being on the sea and being with nature.She had obviously not met me before so had no idea what I might look like normally. However, perhaps the " tranaformational self discovery" that Findhorn promotes is not found by something you go somewhere to gain, but it is something which you find when you strip away the stuff that gets in the way of our essential natures. Certainly, sailing and being on the sea and just looking and not thinking much beyond the immediate is a de-shackling experience and perhaps enables you to be more of who you really are. This may be a bit early in the trip to be philosophising like this and I should welcome comments from those who are following my ramblings. Somene tell me if I'm losing the plot please,

Day 38-Saturday 25th June. Loch Ness to Inverness.

Yesterday evening as I left the northern end of Loch Ness and entered the very small Loch Dochfour I saw an osprey. It flapped around, then dropped down to the water, but failed to catch anything and then moved on. It was about the only bit of wildlife I saw on the Loch, other than a few Oystercatchers. As I found my Internet was so slow yetsrday I didn't upload a couple of photosI  took. One was of a German yacht trying to make the most of the almost non existent wind and one of the ruined Urquart Castle. there seem to be a lot of large northern European yachts in the canal.Germans, Fins and Swedes are everywhere.This is in contrast to the south and west coast where it is all French. i know its all about geography, but its still interesting to witness the difference.

Joan and John Smith in Hard Tack had moved across the Loch much more quickly than me and had cleared the lock at Dochgarroch before the British Waterways staff had fineshed for the day. Jim and Margret weren't so fast though and I rafted up alongside Bali Voe III for the evening. We shared a beer and I learned more about their lives. They were both retired geography teachers, though this was not his original choice of career. A car accident when he was thrown through the windscreen as a youngster had left him without vision in one eye and ended his career in the Merchant Navy. It doesn't seem to have put paid to his time in the sea though. They have covered a lot of miles between them.

As we waited for yet another set of locks to open we all had coffee on Hard Tack. It was so spacious and later Joe and i talked about the reasons why boats have become so much larger. It occurred to me that apart from increased affluence and expectations,it may well be the influence of the poor suffering wives who put to sea with sailor husbands. There is such little space on a boat the size of Hylje and its a lot to make a woman suffer the lack of space as well as the greater fear of adverse conditions on the water. There are always exceptions to the rule and there are a good many great sailing women who have more courage than many blokes but there is a clear caricature of the man who sails and the woman who goes with him.

It was only about 8 miles to the sea, but it took us nearly 5 1/2 hours. the tide was then wrong for setting off eastwards along the Cromarty Firth. i resolved to go into Inverness marina with Joan and Joe who we had caught up with.Waiting in the final sea lock we all saw another osprey. It was fishing in the shallows of the estuary and was hovering in its flap-flap sort of way. they are such large wings and it seems much more awkward than a Kestrel when its doing the same thing.Its legs hand down as well which seem to add to the awkwardness.

The basin of the sea lock feels like being in one vast infinity swimming pool as you float high above the rest of the estuary. The canal had been another of Thoma Telford's little projects and had taken 21 years to complete. Even back then it had its naysayers but they were all proved wrong when it was opened in 1822.

Overall, it had been an interesting trip through the canal. We all agreed it lacks the wildlife interest of following the coast.It involves a lot of motoring though.A lot of it is straight line stuff and there is not a lot en route to make you want to extend the stay.  Plus points are the friendliness and helpfulness of the staff who seem to all have good senses of humour though.

Whilst waiting at one of the lock entrances i saw a couple of ducks waiting for their mates to return in their canoes!

Inverness Marina is only just beyond the last lock and before you pass under the Kessock bridge.

.It was the venue of the Inverness boat show today and the place was heaving with lifeboats, stalls, helicopter displays. This was its second year.

There was a chap on the whale and dolphin tent who I talked to about the difference between common and bottlenose dolphins. He had a life size blowup of a bottlenose dolphin and he confirmed the differences i had deduces between the two. It seems common dolphins tend to be in the west coast so i am unlikely to see any more of them. they are also more pelagic than the bottle nose ones who seem to be quite territorial There  are loads of these in the Moray Firth and it seems  i will be very unlucky if I don't get to see some.

From here I want to go to Findhorn for my next stop. I have heard so much about the place over the years but have never been there. It's about a 6 hour sail from here.

For those who are reading this blog and didn't read the first page or have forgotten it I said that i was trying to raise some money for the RNLI and RSPB and provided a couple of links for people to make some contributions. I get emails from these sites saying that nobody is contributing so if you'd like to think about going to the links and giving some money that would be great. Ta