North Sea here we come!

'Flaming Sambucas', says Captain Ahab,'We're at Sea again!'

A cloudy morning in Fort Augustus after a beautiful day and a nice quiet night on the canal mooring. Good showers and facilities on this canal. We got up again at sevenish, only to learn that the lock wouldn't open until 9. Well, on a boat there's always something to do, organising and of course checking weather forecasts and planning ahead.

The first leg was pure joy. We descended onto the famous Loch Ness and after a short while realised that there was quite a good wind directly from behind. That meant of course spinnaker practise. The purple and white chute shot up really fast and before long we were cruising down the loch at little over 8 knots at the best of times. Just as if to celebrate our lone passage through the lake with no monsters but the bearded crew of our boat, a couple of RAF Tornados flew over really low and a bit over 8 knots, we estimated. Quite a sight.

After the loch we started motoring down the remaining locks and the weather picked up and hey, presto! Another beautiful, warm day! Some of us had to do a bit of writing, though and remain inside. A few locks down, arriving in Inverness we decided that the toilet seat needed repaired before the North Sea passage and additional crew from Denmark. I got off at the lock and took a taxi to the nearest Chandlery, called 'Gael Force', pun intended, surely.

Found new hinges for the seat and of course some other odds and sods, bits and bobs, like a sea anchor or drogue to slow down in case of severe downwind surfing. And duct tape, of course! How could have we got so far without it? Meanwhile Fuss stocked up the provisions at Lidls and ChiefEng and Dynamo fuelled up the diesel and filled up the drinking water. The diesel consumption of the Yanmar 27hp was a bit of a shock! A positive one! Instead of the estimated 2.5litres per hour it would seem that the solid diesel only burns about 1.5 per hour! Incredible! Total engine hours in Inverness about 31. There's a few hours of idling too to keep the batteries charged and fridge ticking etc. and of course the laptops charged for writing blogs and some other important scripts.

It took surprisingly long, however, to clear the passage to Inverness partly due to oncoming traffic and partly the traffic across the swing bridges and at the last two locks a train that was quite a bit late and certainly frustrated your humble narrator, who was particularly anxious to get out to sea and on the way with the ebb. High tide was at 16.30 and the locks closed at 1800. On this occasion they decided to do a bit of overtime to get us out (it must have been because I was staring at them through the hole of my Lucky Irish Connemara stone, that turns enemies into friends, and we finally, snapping photos, pushed down into the sea at 1830. All were in good spirits and to dot the i and cross the t Fuss cooked a lovely pasta with succulent pork in a tomato-onion sauce.

The last lock gave us a really good forecast for the North Sea, so my estimate for a time of Arrival in Helsingor, Denmark would now be on Saturday 5th some time. It is now 22.50. Dynamo and ChiefEng will do the first watch until 0100. Fuss is already asleep and I should rest too, before we come on. Soon we will lose the coverage of the UK mobile network, unless some of the North Sea oil rigs have aerials. Pity also, that I haven't managed to post any pictures into the blog, partly just being too busy and to a large part, the slow connections that do not support uploading big photos - servers time out, you see.

Harr, harr, harr

Ahab