Day 34- Tuesday 21st June Summer Solstice

Last night there was a lovely sunset and all the buildings glowed orange in the light.At anchor the boat moved around quite a bit and there was that grating sound you hear travelling up the chain that makes you anxious about the anchor dragging. That's why people are prepared to pay £15 for a visitor's buoy rather than anchor for free. You are paying for peace of mind.I could have done with a shower though and decided I'd spend this evening in the marina

 The forecast was for the rain to arrive during the day.I had arranged today to meet my sister Jacqui and her husband Martin, so I wouldn't be going far.The rain arrived just as they did and we bought sandwiches to eat on Hylje. It then eased for a while so we motored down to Little Horseshoe Bay on Kerrera. We anchored and set off to find the tea room and Gylan Castle.

 The track was signposted as the Kerrera experience and we joked that it was a local jape that there was no tea shop.It turned out worse than that there was a tea shop but it was closed.

It's roundhouse toilet was open though, which had been built with grant funding.

The castle made up for the disappointment of the closed tea shop.It is typical of its type, sitting high and proud on a vertical cliff face. The geology of the cliff is interesting. It is a raised beach and was formed by volcanic action forcing the land levels up. The cliffs looked like they were made of beach pebbles and mortar as if they were built with the castle.The caves at its base would once have been at sea level,

 This was another one which had been set fire to by Cromwell's troops. They had done their usual trick of threatening to massacre royalist sympathisers unless they surrendered and then killing most of them after they had. It is a romantic looking ruin with its turrets and face carvings under the window.I tried to imagine what it must have been like to have a small army outside your front door and to have to decide whether to let them in or fight it out.We can have no comprehension of it.

Kerrera used to be a flying boat bas in the second world war and though we saw no evidence of this it is a lovely island to walk through.As we walked and talked, Jacqui and I recalled hearing on Scottish radio a  couple of days before the Aussie journalist who had tried to tell the Dali Lama a joke. He said the Dali Lama went into a pizza shop and said" can you make me one with everything?". He didn't get it and the journalist said oh that didn,t go well did it?

We had our cup of tea on the way back to Oban harbour.Jacqui had noticed that on the North quay there were showers so maybe I wouldn't need the marina after all. She also suggested we have a fish supper in town and there was a fish restaurant next to the showers. The meal was superb and we were entertained by 3 Japanese who had ordered a maritime blowout and who spent as much time photographing their meal as eating it. After the meal we went our different ways.I went to the shower room to find it had closed at 8pm, though it was 7.55! Oh well it was only me that had to sleep with me!