The Idiot Farm: Sailing Painfully Slowly Round Britain’s ‘Big Island’ in a Small Boat, with a Side Order of Low Countries

By Martin Edge

“The Idiot Farm” is the story of my sailing trip round what most people would probably call Mainland Britain in my wee 27ft long keeled yacht. I never really set out to go round the whole thing, so the journey was incredibly slow, sporadic, and and not in any particular order. I started out in 2006 and didn’t really finish until 2018. Had a garden snail started out on the same 3000 mile journey at the same time as me, he’d have finished only a few days after I did, which I don’t count as a particularly triumphant victory.

So most of this volume is just about extended holidays sailing around the bulk of Britain. It’s not a gripping, terrifying adventure yarn about braving the savage elements or being dismasted in unforecast hurricanes. In fact it’s all quite sedate, easy and achievable by a congenital wimp in a small boat. Hopefully this volume is mostly a fairly light and – with luck – amusing tale about a fairly ordinary journey. It’s by no stretch of the imagination a pilot book. In fact much of the information in it that isn’t fairly ancient is entirely subjective and only there because it annoyed or amused me. But it might give you a few clues about where’s worth stopping off around the coast and where isn’t.

As well as the coast of the UK and a tiny bit of eastern Ireland, I bang on quite a bit about cruising the fantastic, sheltered inland waters of the Netherlands and bits of the Frisian Islands as far as the Elbe

During the ridiculously long period spanned by my trip, the UK was changing a hell of a lot faster than I was sailing. It was impossible to ignore that fact that the world of 2018 felt like a completely different place to the world of 2006. So I’m afraid I haven’t ignored it. In fact I’ve rather tended to rant on about the difference and the dreadful, parlous state that the UK finds itself in as this book is published in early 2020. I know that a book about sailing isn’t supposed to have politics in it, so this is just a warning. Not an apology, because I think they need to be there, but a warning to the sensitive and the idiotic.

If you do choose to buy this book I sincerely hope you enjoy it and that, should we meet at some point in the future as we sail aimlessly about, you’ll at least not offer me any violence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Martin Edge
• Release date: Jan 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463180013

Martin Edge

"Travels with my Rant" Most of my writing is about my travels. Mostly very slow travels. For some years now I've been plodding round the seas of northern Europe aboard a small sailing boat. To date I've published three accounts of these trips. For years I poked around in some of the more obscure parts of some developing countries, hitch-hiking and travelling by boat, train and bus. Some of the buses were slower than my boat. The record was 12 hours to go 11 miles in the Shan State in northern Burma. I'll soon be publishing two volumes entitled "Travels with my Rant" and "The Front of Beyond". These will include tales about hopping across dodgy borders in places like East Timor and Nicaragua. Whilst travel may broaden some minds and narrow others, travelling slowly and alone changes your perspective on the world around you. I like to think it hones the senses and heightens the critical faculties. Others have agreed that yes, it does make me rant on and on about everything. My travel writings are not gripping tales of derring-do and one man's survival in a savage wilderness against all the odds. I am, in fact, something of a wimp. Neither do they consciously seek to maintain the mythology and exoticism of travel to far flung parts. The fact is that more or less everywhere on earth people wear jeans and ride scooters. The documentary makers must have a hell of a job editing the world so that it's full of tribal head-dresses and loin cloths. Culture shock isn't all it's cracked up to be and nowhere on the planet is as alien as it appears to be from a distance. Except Manchester of course. I've tried to give a flavour of the places I've visited and to discuss those aspects of their landscape, environment, people, culture, economy and politics which make them interesting. In 2014 I published a sort of pilot book entitled "105 Rocks and Other Stuff to Tie your Boat to in Eastern Sweden and Finland". It's full of photos, maps, descriptions and waypoints for, as the name suggests, 105 Scandinavian rocks and other harbours. It's available FREE of charge at my website (www.edge.me.uk) as a web file and as a pdf. There's yet more stuff on my web page at http://www.edge.me.uk/index.htm. This includes a pile of more academic papers written while I was Head of Research of the Architecture School in Aberdeen.

Book preview

Preface

It’s embarrassing really. I keep coming across tales of people enduring unimaginable hardships to achieve incredible feats at sea. It’s not just the high profile, newsworthy stuff, about people winning the Golden Globe race, or pitchpoling in a massive storm in the Southern Ocean. Everywhere I turn there’s some seemingly perfectly ordinary, unassuming bloke on Facebook or somewhere, who’s sailed single-handed across the Pacific, or become the oldest person to circumnavigate Madagascar blindfold in a canoe. Yet here I am peddling this crap.

Though I’ve sailed over 45,000 nautical miles now, three quarters of them aboard my 27ft Vancouver cutter ‘Zophiel’ and more than half of them solo, almost every single one of those miles has been easy peasy. If I’ve gone out solo I’ve not gone in a gale. If I’ve crossed an ocean I’ve done it the easy, trade wind way, like the proper wimp I am.

So if you’re looking for tales of incredible human endurance and survival against all odds I suggest you look elsewhere. But if you can be arsed reading about someone sailing a wee boat around northern Europe the easy way and ranting angrily about things en-route, please read on.

This is a tale about my extremely slow and episodic circumnavigation of what you might be inclined to call Mainland Britain. For pedantic reasons and to avoid accusations of bias against the various populations of other islands in the group, I’ve decided to call it ‘Big Island’.

I should say something about the title of this book, which went through various iterations during the long and disorganised process of putting all this nonsense together. As I write this it’s early in 2020 and we are still reeling from what was almost certainly the worst thing to happen in Western Europe since 1945. That was on December 12th 2019, in case you were wondering. That was the day on which it finally became inevitable that Britain would become Europe’s first and, it is fervently to be hoped last, massive, experimental Idiot Farm. I will do you the courtesy of assuming that you are not an idiot. In fact I’m sure you aren’t. But the fact is that some forty-odd percent of the population of Britain are idiots. They have now voluntarily consigned both themselves and everyone else to be part of this captive breeding programme for stupid people, the Idiot Farm.

Since this tale spans a period from the halcyon, more or less rational days of 2006, to post-truth, post-logic, pre-insidious apocalypse 2018, it has been impossible to ignore these changes as the land I have been circumnavigating sinks into the mire and makes the transition from advanced democracy to Idiot Farm. But this is all getting a bit doom-laden already, on page one. It’s supposed to be a light, amusing tale about an extended snailing trip. So if you want an analysis of how Big Island is becoming, quite literally, an idiot farm, take a squint at the Postscript at the end of the book. There I have a go at a more detailed explanation.

On the other hand, if you are in fact an idiot, I’m sorry but what the hell do you expect me to do about it?

Big Island, the largest of the archipelago of 187 inhabited islands that make up both the Idiot Farm and Eire is, of course, still pretty tiny in the scheme of things. Moored just offshore in the North Atlantic, this is an island so cut off from mainland society, so parochial in its beliefs, that its denizens still see themselves, amusingly, as being at the centre of world culture.

In old Victorian adventure stories all the best tribes believed they were at the centre of the world. Their creation myths make them the central focal point of the universe. When someone shows up from the outside, they are typically either treated as a god or immediately dispatched to a cooking pot. Given the human propensity for pompous egocentricity, this is understandable amongst peoples who have had no or little contact with the outside world. What is surprising is that it’s a belief system which often survives outside contact and flies in the face of all the evidence. Sometimes for millennia. Thousands of years ago, southern Europeans were quite content to describe their wee sea as the Mediterranean and think of it as being at the centre, despite the mounting evidence of stuff like India, China and Japan away off to one side.

It’s a phenomenon which continues to this day. Many Londoners, for example, are so defiantly parochial that they are quite happy to believe that they don’t really live at the bottom of Big Island. To them places like Manchester are in the north of their country. People’s brains still cling tenaciously to a child’s topological map of the world, in which they are at the middle, where their auntie lives is nearly at the other end of the country and everything else is just a blur.

This book is about a trip around this wee European island, shrouded in mist, where such belief systems are still prevalent and where outsiders are still, it seems, seen as a threat to some imagined idyll. Happily, immigration over the past few decades has served to civilise the island and draw it more into the international mainstream. Most of us are not as parochial as we once were. But the place remains the home of a fairly primitive island race, which is set to become more primitive still in the coming insidious apocalypse of out Old Etonian Overlords.

I had no particular ambition to sail round the Idiot Farm and that’s why this book is a kind of episodic mish-mash, covering about twelve years of sailing. It just sort of happened that, in trying to get to various other places over the years, I ended up going all the way round the Big Island. Taking twelve years to sail round it is, by anyone’s reckoning, slow. But I wasn’t racing around an island but sailing round an island race.

Because this ‘circumnavigation’ was accidental and unplanned, it all happened in a funny sort of order and the travels I’m going to write about occurred in 2006, 2013, 2014 and 2018. So that’s simple, isn’t it? Well, not really. I’m going to eschew a chronological order, for a more geographical one. So we’ll be zapping about through time like some particularly implausible episode of Dr Who in which the Tardis has a mental breakdown. Basically we’ll be going from 2006 to 2018, then back to 2013, then ignoring a lot of other stuff and jumping to 2014. In the process we’ll be dipping a little into, in no particular order, 2017, 2009, 2019, 2012, 2015, 2011 and 1977.

This nonsense was penned in 2019 and early 2020. The very last few moments of what might broadly be called British civilization. It marks the end of a period of development and improvement of the collective lot of the people of Big Island and the start of the new feudal age – the age of the Idiot Farm. As you read this ostensibly simple sailing tale you will be struck – and quite probably irritated – by how much I bang on, from time to time, about the utter disaster that is the withdrawal of the Idiot Farm from mainland civilisation.

There, that’s the politics out of the way. Though they will raise their ugly heads again, I can assure you that most of this book is just about nice places to sail to for your holidays. I hope you find the rest of this nonsense at least moderately diverting.

Martin Edge, Edinburgh, January 2020.

Part 1: The Proper Way - 2006

Obviously if we’re doing this spatially and non-chronologically – in fact geogrologically – we could start anywhere. But at least let’s start at the temporal beginning. 2006. At that time Zophiel was based on the Forth. The previous year I’d cut through the Forth Clyde canal to the west coast. The year before that through the Caley Canal from Inverness to Fort William – Fort Bill as he’s known to his friends. So though I had no particular intention of circumnavigating the UK’s largest Island, I decided that year to get to the west coast by nipping round the top of it, via the Pentland Firth and the terrifyingly named Cape Wrath.

There’s a lot of ways of circumnavigating the Idiot Farm. Or rather, there’s a lot of ways of saying that you’ve circumnavigated it. Most of them are at best self-delusion and at worst short-cutting scams. I’ve banged on about at least one of these short-cuts in the past, in my earlier rant ‘A Gigantic Whinge on the Celtic Fringe’. That scam is the common tactic of demeaning the population of the Highlands by not counting them as part of the UK and nipping through the Caley Canal. Loads of folk do it and are obviously scoundrels, so nothing more needs to be said about them.

For a proper circumnavigation of the Idiot Farm of course, you need to go round Ireland. Or at least round Northern Ireland and up the Shannon or something. Northern Ireland is part of the UK but not of Great Britain, for some reason. (Just look at your passport to confirm this if you are unfortunate enough to have a British one). To go round Great Britain, you need to head north round Muckle Flugga at the north end of Unst, at the north end of Shetland. Then south west round St Kilda (we’ll ignore Rockall as it’s disputed territory). Then south through the North Channel and down the Irish Sea. You can cut east of Rathlin Island and the tax haven of the Isle of Person if you want. Then you head round the Daft Isles and up the Channel of the Angles. You can ignore the Channel Islands as well, as they are another offshore tax scam and not part of the increasingly ironically named United Kingdom. Then you head back up north to Scotland and snivelisation, taking care to leave the wee Farne Isles to port.

I didn’t do that. So this is not a tale about a circumnavigation of Britain. It’s just about going round what can variously be described as mainland UK, ‘Big Island’ or the largest lump of Idiot Farm. That’s what I started to do, back in 2006.

Chapter 1: Heading for Hippyocracy

It’s hard to imagine now, but back in those halcyon days, when we lived in what felt like a stable and more or less rational civilisation which wasn’t falling apart around our ears, I actually worked for a living. Outrageous! On weekdays I had to make myself available for – sometimes even physically present at – the architecture school in Aberdeen’s smaller, less well known and frankly crapper university.

So it was on a Sunday in early July that my other half Anna and I left Scotland’s ropiest marina and our home port – Port Edgar on the Forth – bound for Arbroath. We’d been held up for a day by the haar – the persistent fog which can plague that coast in the summer months when there’s easterly winds. But that Sunday it was clear as we motored with the tide, then bore away and headed under full sail north east. In the afternoon the gentle breeze went to the north east and we beat towards the Tay. Having spared us the fog, the weather gods then chucked thunderstorms at us and by mid afternoon we were motoring towards Arbroath in the pissing down rain.

Once you are in Arbroath harbour you are perfectly sheltered and secure behind a lock gate. Well, more or less. When the lock gate was quite new the control system threw a wobbly one day and chose to empty out the whole harbour at low tide, to the chagrin of boat owners. That event probably led to the annoying policy whereby you are restricted both by the tide and by office hours. The lock gates only let you into and out of the harbour a couple of hours either side of high tide and only if the harbour manny is on duty. Arrive after he’s away for his tea and you’re knackered, no matter how high the tide.

This time however we arrived by five pm and moored up to a pontoon. Arbroath has a rich and ancient history. The declaration of Arbroath, signed in 1320, still has strong resonances in Scotland today. But the history isn’t exactly oozing out of the pavements nowadays. Like so many Scottish towns you can tell that it had its heyday quite a long time ago. The architecture speaks of better times, but now it’s more or less a squaddie town in which, if you have to stop, you hope to get a pint in a pub without anyone causing any trouble.

We left Zoph there and took the train back to Edinburgh. Though the Sunday had been fine the ensuing week was one in which I might as well be working. The coast was beset by haar from Monday to Friday. When we returned the following Friday evening we found a wee Dutch family shivering damply aboard their boat. They had arrived four days before and had been sitting on the boat ever since. Visibility was down to about fifty metres and they saw little point in going anywhere in the dreich. That’s the really annoying thing about the sodding haar if you’re a nautical type. We’d spent the intervening week on land, mostly within about 5 miles of the sea and hadn’t seen the slightest sign of fog. In fact there hadn’t been a cloud in the sky.

That’s how the bloody stuff works. Winds from the east bring warm summer air off the Scandinavian land at about 25 degrees. It hits the cold North Sea, which is about 12 degrees. The result is that once it’s exactly halfway across it condenses into thick fog. Therefore the entire western half of the North Sea is like some mythical scene from Jason and the Argonauts and you daren’t go out for fear of being lured to your doom by the Sirens. It’s more or less impassable. Of course when the air hits the summer land it warms up a couple of degrees, with the result that anywhere a few hundred yards inland is bathed in sun and in the grip of a heatwave.

It’s a total bastard. In the past I’ve driven down to the marina at Port Edgar, overheating in shorts, tee shirt and sandals. I’ve parked the car and walked to the root of the pier in full sun, then seen people coming from the pontoons in full wet gear, thick socks, massive jumpers, balaclavas and skiing gauntlets. Halfway down the pier it goes from a full summer day to a dreich winter’s evening. And it can stay like that for a fortnight. If the Dutchsters in Arbroath had bothered to wander a few hundred yards inland they would have had five days of high summer. Albeit summer in Arbroath.

Anyway, the morning after we returned to Arbroath Sod’s Law didn’t, for once, apply either to the weather or the tides and we left the harbour at the sensible time of 10am in the sun, with just a bit of Simpsons’ cloud and a force 4 to 5 up the bum. We sailed under jib and main, but without the staysail, the whole of the 32 miles to Stonehaven. As the wind increased we gybed occasionally to stay on a broad reach and avoid the possibility of doing so accidentally. With a preventer on conditions were good, with just enough chop to disturb Anna slightly. By 4pm we’d tied up against the wall in Stonehaven, with only a moderate amount of scend to make the berth only slightly uncomfortable. Later we were rafted up on by a small yacht called ‘Harmony’, from Dalgety Bay on the Forth, bound for Orkney.

Ah the naivety of youth. In those days I quite liked Stonehaven Harbour. It is quite an appealingly aesthetic place, with a couple of decent pubs and a seaside vibe in the summer. But I’ve just been rereading my rant about it from 2011. By then I was cynical, bitter and twisted. The harbour was a rip-off. No facilities, a ridiculous price to tie up on a dodgy wall, horrible in any sort of easterly and you had to be constantly on guard against the bloody fishermen, who would cast yachts adrift on a whim if they wanted a space on the wall. Back in 2006 I was obviously less cynical and more trusting as I actually seemed to enjoy it.

The next day we were joined by my cousin’s husband and teenage son for the trip to Peterhead. Though they lived in Aberdeen they had just returned from several years in Norway, where the lad had learned to sail. At the time I still thought of Norway as a forbidding, windswept bit of the north Atlantic where massive waves crashed into cliffs and the sea was a dangerous maelstrom. I hadn’t yet realised that Norwegian sailing is almost all done on ripple-free duck ponds. Again, unaccountably, the tides didn’t dictate that we left in the middle of the night, so at mid day we left the harbour and got the sails up.

Given his Viking provenance I was surprised that the teenager started feeling a tad pukesome as we bowled along with a nice force 5 behind us. It is true that the new southerly chop was somewhat at odds with the longer easterly swell that was still coming in – a legacy of the wind a couple of days before – making for slightly lumpy conditions.

In a rare victory for Zoph we sailed past the boat from Dalgety Bay, which had left harbour before us. We don’t often come across slower boats than us. As the day went on low, lowering cloud descended on us, making things seem less bright and optimistic, but it was still a good sail for a while. Soon the wind died however and we ended up motor-sailing to Peterhead. There we were joined in the marina by the wee boat ‘Harmony’, the crew of which pronounced the passage ‘horrible’.

Thank goodness for a judicial system which has historically believed in incarceration as the most appropriate punishment for as many people as possible. It was the massed inmates of Peterhead Prison who built the huge breakwater that makes Peterhead, literally, the best port on the east coast of Big Island. It’s the only port which you can access at all times of tide, in all winds from any direction, with no great tidal flow and in which you are secure from all weather. Its marina sits in a shallow area of white sandy beaches in one corner of the massive harbour, still loomed over by the friendly, protective presence of the maximum security prison.

You can see why they put a maximum security prison in Peterhead. Why not? It’s not as if it’s going to bring the tone down or anything. Other than being an excellent harbour Peterhead has literally nothing else to offer. Frankly it’s a dump. It’s just a shame that it’s often the first introduction to Scotland for visitors who have sailed across from the mainland – from Holland, Germany or Denmark. Mind you, it at least lays down a few cultural markers for them and helps to limit their expectations of the Idiot Farm.

Work still wouldn’t go away, so we took a lift to Aberdeen from my cousin then a train to Edinburgh. The following Friday we returned to Peterhead by train and bus. I nearly always seem to end up going round Rattray Head at a time in the morning that civilised people would consider to be the middle of the night. But both our arrival time and the state of the tide dictated an afternoon departure. It was fine and sunny when we left the pontoon and, after the customary message on the VHF, announcing our departure to the casual and impenetrably Doric bloke at Peterhead Harbour Radio, headed for Rattray Head.

There was a decent bit of breeze behind us, but as usual the sea around Rattray Head was a bit rolly, so after a while we motor-sailed to quieten the flapping sails. Rattray Head is one of those bits of sea that always lets you know it’s serious. Even with no wind and an apparently flat calm, it’s usually surging this way and that and you feel there’s a sort of underlying power to it. You get an inkling as to how sea monster myths arose in the minds of sailors.

But we had a fine passage round the point and as we turned more westward and the breeze came onto the beam, had a good fast reach along the Moray coast. I didn’t want to arrive at the narrow, rocky, potentially dodgy entrance to Whitehills in the dark and in fact we completed the 39 mile trip in good time – fantastically good time for slow old Zoph – at 9pm. Though Whitehills could be extraordinarily dodgy in some conditions, for instance in any sea from the north, in a gentle southerly it’s easy-peasy and we tied up to a pontoon in the tight little harbour.

Here we benefitted as usual from the almost complete failure of the fishing industry in the region. Various harbours have been, as I believe people say these days, ‘repurposed’ for yachts. So we took advantage of the immaculate, bungaloid shower facilities, lounged on the sofas in the visitors lounge and browsed the books left for visitors. Since we were no longer in Aberdeenshire the council thought they ought to provide some sort of facilities for our money.

We had yet another civilised departure time the following day as we left at 11am and headed for the hippy stronghold of Findhorn, another 38 miles down the coast. Findhorn is a large, mostly drying sandy bay with a bar (not that kind of bar you idiot) and a shifting entrance, so it was important that we arrived around high tide. There was sod-all wind, but by now it was full summer, with properly cloudless skies and hot sun, so we weren’t complaining. Well not about the weather anyway. Two thirds of the way we passed close to Lossiemouth – a possible destination with a good harbour – and carried on.

As we motored closer to Findhorn Bay I got the local pub on the phone. I’d heard that they might provide visitors’ moorings. Two things became apparent during the phone call. Firstly, no, they didn’t. Secondly my information about high tide was completely wrong. Bugger. We upped the revs and sped – insofar as it’s possible for Zoph to speed – towards Findhorn.

It was nearing close of play on the hottest Sunday in July, so there was a proper party atmos as we crossed the bar and headed against the tide into Findhorn Bay. We were late for the tide but reassured by the presence of loads of local boats doing the same as us. That’s a bad habit of mine. Despite frequent evidence to the contrary I still labour under the illusion that other people out at sea must know what they are doing. So if I’m out there amongst other boats I’m way more complacent than if Zoph and I are out alone.

Though Findhorn is a big bay most of it dries completely to sand. It’s pleasant holiday environment for paddlers and windsurfers, but crap for a yacht with a keel. The only bit where there’s water all the time is in the channel near the entrance on the east side, in front of the village. We bobbed about amongst the moorings here, contemplating where it might be possible to anchor. As in so many British harbours the moorings have more or less taken over. There’s usually an apology of a bit which has been left to anchor in, but it’s more a theoretical anchorage than anything you’d want to spend the night in. Here little account is taken of the fact that you need swinging room to anchor and it all looked very tight.

But a friendly voice called us on the VHF from a house on the shore and pointed out an empty mooring. The mooring was owned by the voice but not required at the moment, since its boat was ashore. So we gratefully picked up the buoy and cracked open the G&T.

I’ve never been on a swinging mooring before from which you could step ashore onto a beach. Well, OK, I’m exaggerating a bit, but not much. Because of the bend in the channel and the speed of the current, the beach at that point is very steep to and the mooring close to the shore. At low tide, when we were not tide-rode but swinging to the south west breeze, it would have been just about possible to step into the dinghy, let it out to the extent of its normal painter and step ashore onto the beach.

We went ashore for a wander. Findhorn is several different things. Firstly it’s quite a pleasant seaside village, strung out along the shore of the shallow bay. Being a windswept sort of place fringed by beaches, its environs are gratifyingly filled with windblown sand of the sort that is redolent of the holidays of youth. The windswept bungalows along the sea shore could doubtless appear dreich and damp in the winter, but on a glorious summer Sunday the place looked and felt fine. The pubs and cafes were block-a-chock and the whole village had a cheap and cheerful holiday atmosphere.

The second thing that Findhorn is, is right smack-bang next to RAF Kinloss. This military site is dedicated to the pursuit of burning huge quantities of fossil fuel and frightening both sheep and people by flying at the speed of sound about twenty feet above the ground up and down most of Scotland’s glens. I’m not sure why they do this. Presumably they just like frightening sheep and are trying to hurry along climate change by burning fuel. Kinloss makes Findhorn a village with a lot of military history, which is probably reflected in the incomers who choose to settle there.

The third and most famous thing that Findhorn is, is a massive centre for UK hippydom. In the 1960s an expanding group of hippies colonised a bit of land near Findhorn. Living in caravans, they started growing vegetables and suchlike and expanded to carrying out all sorts of experimental eco-projects. I’ve taken students there and studied some of their ecological building techniques, natural sewage treatment systems and stuff like that. Early on it was all terribly laissez-faire and inclusive and non-judgemental. You get the picture. On the face of it all well and good. As something of an old hippy myself I ought to approve.

But that was in the days before all things eco became symbols of status and hugely saleable commodities. When there were only about four wild eyed, hunted vegans on Big Island, not four million. The community grew and as it did it became more formalised. It became the Findhorn Foundation. It built a fence round itself and introduced rules. Two of the main rules were: 1) You have to have a load of money to get in and 2) No bloody hippies! The new eco-elite certainly didn’t want all those sodding hippies in caravans camping out on their doorstep.

In a universal lesson in hypocrisy, the middle class punters who turned up looking for a more tolerant, deeply spiritual life, decided that they’d attract a better class of deeply spiritual being if they made sure that it was expensive. They decided that it was more conducive to meditation if you didn’t have to look at poor people. They became the main movers in trying to shut down the wider community of hangers-on, who had been there since the early days but were not part of the registered charity which ran and formalised the place.

In the end I found it too difficult to work with them. If you asked how some aspect of the sewage treatment system worked you were quite likely to be told that you had to understand it on a spiritual dimension. In today’s post-truth world, in which we are encouraged to believe in any old bollocks if it makes us feel cosy, Findhorn’s probably doing very nicely thank you. A friend of mine went to a conference there at which everyone was told that, for reasons of deep inner peace, applause was only allowed with one hand, ‘clapping’ against the air. Honestly, that’s true. Oh well, enjoy your suburban bungalows guys. I just wish you’d recognise that that’s all they are, even if some of them look like hobbit-holes.

We preferred the village to the bloody Foundation, so spent another day there enjoying the sunshine. Anna was off to see her mum in Inversneck and then back to work in Edinburgh. For me, hallelujah, the holidays had started. So the next day I waited with Anna for the bus to Elgin and sent her packing. Now I would be on my own for a while.

Sod’s law was back in force, so to get the tide out of Findhorn Bay I cast off from the mooring at five a.m. the following day. Slowly the morning resolved itself into a reasonably fine one, with quite a strong south westerly breeze. This was a pretty good direction for a passage to Wick. I mused that we’d been pretty lucky thus far in that respect. Any contrary breeze we’d had was no more than about a force two and most of the wind had been behind us. I zoomed along in an increasing force five under full main and jib and the wind gusting up to about thirty knots. At first it was a good broad reach in a choppy sea. Two boats sailed past heading south, looking quite hard pressed beating into it. I passed a couple of supply boats and an old rig just hanging about and loitering a good few miles off the Cromarty Firth.

To keep on a decent reach I was heading a bit far west, so when I came closer to the coast I had to turn more directly down wind. At the same time the breeze died to a force two or three, the sun went in and it started to drizzle. So I ended up motor-sailing the second half of the journey to the unprepossessing, uninspiring town of Wick in, appropriately enough, a fine dreich. On this occasion, in a south westerly, the entry was much less fraught than it was two years later, when I approached in an ill-advised force six from the south east, which pushed swell right into the harbour. I described that more traumatic passage in a previous book ‘Floating Low to Lofoten.

Blissfully unaware of how much I’d be shitting myself on that occasion I entered the outer harbour and tied up against a tall, wet and rather unfriendly looking wall.

Chapter 2: Zaphod’s Sunglasses

The next challenge was the Pentland Firth. As a piece of water The Pentland Firth is a well known bastard, but I had a secret weapon, so I wasn’t worried. Well… I can say now, with the benefit of hindsight, that I wasn’t worried, since this was in July 2006, nothing bad happened and I survived unscathed. At the time of course I was as nervous as a gerbil in a cattery. The tides running through the Pentland Firth, between the Mainland of Orkney and Big Island are some of the strongest and potentially most dangerous in the world. The current has apparently been measured at sixteen knots, which is about three times the maximum speed that my wee 27ft long keeler can go under motor and arguably as fast as any tide in the world.

If water just flowed fast this would not be a life-threatening problem in itself. You’d just potentially end up in completely the wrong place. But of course the sea’s not that simple and if it moves along at sixteen knots it’s going to create massive standing waves. Sailing in it will be much like surviving a gigantic washing machine on its maximum spin cycle. The people who named dodgy bits of sea and dangerous headlands had a sense of humour. They liked to scare the hell out of people and called them things like ‘Bloody Foreland’ and ‘Cape Wrath’ (of which more later). But with presumably intentional irony the dodgiest bit through the Pentland Firth is called ‘The Merry Men of Mey’. By all accounts there’s nothing terribly merry about this boiling cauldron of crap which forms right across the Pentland Firth under some conditions.

I sat in Wick harbour contemplating the next day’s passage. If you don’t know Wick, it’s basically the Peterhead of the north and if you don’t know Peterhead it may help to tell you that it’s the Wick of the south. Wick is the sort of town where pound shops used to outnumber all other shops. But by 2006 they had been replaced by rapidly failing 50p shops. There’s not much to attract you to the town and, back in 2006 at any rate, there was even less to attract you to the harbour.

Here Zophiel lay moored, tied up against a harbour wall in, at least, merciful calm. Any sort of east wind and Wick harbour would have become extremely unpleasant. Here I contemplated the concept of the Pentland Firth. When you read about the passage westwards down the Firth it looks practically impossible. You have to pass one point by a certain time but not arrive at a point a couple of miles away before another, entirely unconnected time. When the tide’s with you it’s against the inevitable swell sweeping off the open Atlantic to the west.

For neither the first nor last time I took the wimp’s way out. I decided to cross the Firth to Orkney, instead of nipping down it. But even that wasn’t entirely straightforward. For over a month the east coast had been beset from time to time with haar. With a bit of luck there might not be fog but I couldn’t be sure. The Pentland Firth is a major shipping lane and crossing it would put me at the mercy of all the humungous bulk carriers and massive container ships plying their trade across the Atlantic. I must confess it seems like a different world now, but this was before the days when I had an AIS receiver and well before the days of on-line AIS sites. Come to think of it there was no chance of getting a phone signal off the north coast of Scotland. In fact it was several years before I had a chart plotter. Of course I had a GPS, but I still didn’t fancy wandering through the fog amongst the rocks off Orkney.

As I write this I’ve just had a squint at the shipping in the Pentland Firth on the ‘Marine Traffic’ AIS app and