There aren’t many places where you can anchor so close to a mountain it breathes on you. In heavy weather the draughts of exhaled tempest that rush down the sheer face of Sgùrr Dubh Mòr will sail your boat, under bare poles, around her ground tackle.
Many sailors down the years have experienced violent katabatic-like winds in the Isle of Skye’s Loch Scavaig and yet it continues to lure yachtsmen into its deceptively pond-like embrace.
When Republican gun-runner Conor O’Brien’s 26-ton cutter, Kelpie, anchored next to the 3,000ft Big Black Peak in 1921, seven years after delivering a shipment of rifles to the Irish Volunteers, he was astonished to witness sea spray ‘streaming up a perpendicular cliff’ as a gale created a giant vacuum through the Cuillins.
In 1938 Eric Hiscock, the famed world-girdling Royal Cruising Club (RCC) member, feared his 24ft cutter Wanderer II, would part her anchor chain as ‘the squalls tore round and round in that devil’s cauldron, whipping the spray from the sea and whirling it away overhead to be lost in the low mist which made a roof for the dark pit in which we lay.’
As for the giant’s proximity, even the 19th-century Admiralty Sailing Directions report: ‘the rocky precipitous sides of the mountain […] are altogether so steep that a stone loosened
