by Anne Cholawo
The first job that desperately needed to be done was scraping and anti-fouling her hull. She had been in water without maintenance for nearly two years and she had slowed down significantly because of the amount of sea life growing on her underside. This was a job that could take several days and needed the right conditions. She had to be beached on a high spring tide because of her size.
We stayed tuned to the shipping forecast and when the tide became right, Jill and I put her up on a sandy beach near the old shark station in the harbour where Tex usually beached Petros, ominously known as Hurricane Port. There is quite a lot to remember when beaching a large boat. The timing of the tide is essential. There must be enough time to bring the boat in after throwing the holding anchor aft plus a rope to the shore from her prow before the tide starts to drop. This secures the boat fore and aft, but then more ropes have to be tied from either side of her gunwales to rocks or trees ashore so she cannot drift to right or left. The end result is a little like a spider in the centre of a web.
Once secured, depending on the type of boat, one side of the boat is weighted with rocks or by moving whatever is usually stored in her, so that she lies on one side when the tide is out. That side of the hull is then accessible for scraping and painting. Once finished, the weight is shifted over, ready for the next tide and cleaning the other side of the hull. A Coble is designed specifically for beaching and as well as her long single keel she had two shorter bilge keels on either side that she could rest on, sitting virtually upright. (The hull on most other types of boat is much steeper, without the extra keels. They need to be supported by specially adapted posts known as legs otherwise they would lie too far over on their side and never lift properly once the tide came back in.)
The disadvantage of the Coble hull design was trying to clean between the bilge keels and the main keel. There always seemed to be a few unreachable inches, no matter how far you stretched your arm or grappled with the longest tool you could get hold of. However, Jill and I tackled the job as best we could using hoes, scrapers and wire brushes to remove the worst of the barnacles and mussels. Getting the hull dry enough for the anti-foul paint to stick was another problem and we used piles of old rags and towels, as we were working to a time limit with the tide. This job would have to be done at least once a year.
Jill and I made great use of the Heron when Peter was away. It was now not impossible to get the building materials that I so desperately needed for Glenfield House. The chance to do this arrived one day when Jill told me that Peter needed wood to make a new front door for Leac Mhor as the original one was rotten. He could get the job done more quickly if the wood was waiting for him on the island when he came for his six-to-ten-day stay. This was a good opportunity for me to purchase new floorboards for my kitchen floor and I also wanted to make a door for the doorway between the kitchen and the back hall. Even the thick velvet curtains could not keep out the winter draughts.
After a week or so our wood was delivered to Elgol jetty. According to the shipping forecast, the weather was set fair for Malin and Hebrides and we got there and back quite easily. It was harder to get all the long floor planks unloaded and ashore from the Heron as they had to be balanced on the dinghy a few at a time and rowed to the shore. Then they had to be carried one by one up the beach. But it was very satisfying to get the wood stacked at Glenfield and I soon had a beautiful, newly laid floor. The old one was so rotten a hammer broke it into splinters in no time; it probably took me longer to get out of the habit of avoiding certain areas of the floor.
I also made a tongue and groove door and a new door jam for the back of the kitchen using some long hinges and a latch handle that Robert included in one of his ‘Red Cross’ parcels. I relied greatly on these intermittent parcels, filled with useful and practical items that Robert had thoughtfully been posting me over the last few years. They contained treasures like brass screws, nails, bow saws and other eclectic essentials.
Life was becoming much simpler with access to the Heron. (It gave new meaning to that enigmatic phrase ‘access by courtesy of fishing boat’ which had puzzled me in the estate agents details several years ago.) Apart from that, I was really enjoying a new sense of independence and being in charge of such a large boat. Because I was now able to meet my winkle buyer at the jetty in person and under my own steam, I got to know him much better. I soon discovered that Alan Morgan not only sold offcuts from the local sawmill for firewood but was also an agent for gas and coal. This opened up opportunities for trading in kind. Now I could negotiate for a ton of wood, coal or bottles of gas from my buyer in return for winkles. Every so often, after a trip to Inverness, Alan brought me cases of tinned food such as baked beans. He always paid cash for the excess winkles, over and above our usual trade-off, so it was a mutually beneficial arrangement. Jill also bought firewood, coal and gas from Alan. Trips to the jetty with my winkles invariably meant that the Heron returned to Soay carrying useful cargo for both households.
As Jill usually acted as crew, she became interested in winkle picking. At that time there was an unusually high demand for winkles in Europe, France in particular. The price for winkles, even in the summer months, was fairly good and there were now three prominent winkle buyers on Skye when before there was only one. For a brief spell, pickers enjoyed the financial benefit of ‘winkle wars’ as these three buyers competed for top place. Luckily, I had no loyalty dilemma with my own buyer Alan. He was very honest, gave a good price and had become an excellent and reliable provider for other useful commodities. With prices so high – and because I was making regular trips to Elgol in the Heron – Jill decided trying her hand at picking too. I gave her some spare bags and showed her some of my favourite spots and off she went.
As time passed and our confidence grew, Jill and I became a good team. Jill had an excellent eye for what was needed when coming alongside the jetty or up to the mooring. Our confidence grew to such an extent that we began to take the Heron to more remote beaches along the coast of Skye looking for virgin winkle grounds. One such place is the Rhu, a peninsular on Skye that juts out just northwest of Soay. Beyond it, a sea loch leads down to Glenbrittle farm. Near the very tip of the Rhu are the remains of a Viking fort, not much more than a massive wall today but there is also a canal that the Norsemen built, cutting through from the sea into a brackish freshwater loch a little further inland. At high tide the sea flows up into the loch and I believe the Vikings took their longboats along the canal for safe anchorage in the loch.
There is very little shelter at the Rhu, from most wind directions, southerly or southwesterly winds are the worst. It is wild and lonely, but it is also one of the best places in the whole area for picking winkles. We were by no means the only people to know about it. It had a reputation for being a winkle goldmine and nearly everyone on Soay had been to the Rhu to pick winkles. But it was not a safe anchorage and conditions had to be perfect to confidently pick for a whole spring tide.
There was one perfect summer though, when Jill and I took the Heron over to the Rhu, every day for a whole spring tide without a breath of wind or a drop of rain to spoil our work. Every morning the shipping forecast was the same:
Malin/Hebrides – variable, three or four, fair, good.
It was like getting up for an ordinary mainland job. In the morning we would load the boat with winkle bags and food for the trip. Then we chugged around Soay and up through the sound until we came to the shallow bay a little to the north of the fort and there we would anchor off. We picked two or three bags of winkles each until the tide came in again, then we would lift anchor and motor back home in the long summer twilight. Next day would be exactly the same. It was so profitable and enjoyable we hoped to do it all again later in the summer.
* * *
Not long after our winkling bonanza, DJ came to visit. This time she brought a dog of her own with her, a stray young bitch that she had adopted while on holiday in southern Ireland with her soon-to-be-partner, David. She was an
expressive and attractive dog – long-legged with white and tan markings – imbued with a genuine Irish-Catholic guilt complex. By mutual agreement she was named Bridie or Bridie Bridgett Murphy if she was in disgrace, which was not often, though she always looked a bit guilty about something.
By this time, I found myself with a second dog. Jeanne’s border collie, Kelpie, had decided he would rather live with me than with Tex. At first I tried taking him back to Soay House every time he turned up at Glenfield and Tex tried to keep him shut up at night, but Kelpie always managed to escape. I invariably opened my front door in the morning to find Kelpie sleeping across the threshold. In the end we gave up and let him have his way. He stayed with me until the end of his life. Where Tork was independent and self-assured, Kelpie stuck to me like glue and needed lots of reassurance. No amount of shouting and threats caused Tork to blink. One quiet swearword out of place had Kelpie squirming and apologetic even if it wasn’t directed at him – I began watching my language when he was about. Tork obeyed me when he felt like it. Kelpie, quick and eager to obey, made me look good. If I took him out on the hill, Kelpie seemed to know what I was thinking and together we rounded up sheep like a proper shepherd and working dog. The two dogs had very different characters, but I loved them both.
When DJ and Bridie came to stay, Tork took Bridie on as his apprentice in all things independent and naughty. He was a bad influence but she found his company fascinating and exciting. They were like the canine equivalent of Bonnie and Clyde. The two of them regularly sneaked off together for hours at a time. If we had an idea where they might be, we would usually find them with their heads stuffed down different rabbit holes barking hysterically, or madly digging a hole together. The two of them were off on so many adventures that Bridie slimmed down to a lightweight version of her former self. Poor DJ spent a lot of time worrying about what her dog was up to, imagining terrible hazards. However, they always turned up at the end of the day, muddy, exhausted and hungry, but happy. After a while we became less concerned and trusted to Tork’s innate sense of survival. Kelpie viewed their disappearance with cold disdain; he had a soul far above rabbits and muddy holes.
The spring tide came around and it was time to think of going to the winkles again. The weather forecast for the following day looked promising, with only a hint of a southwesterly wind picking up later on, so we decided to try our luck at the Rhu once more. This time with DJ and the three dogs. The morning was absolutely perfect and we set off from Soay Bay in the Heron loaded with a picnic and a pile of empty winkle bags. I anchored off the boat in the little cove at the Rhu and was rowing ashore with Jill and DJ, when we saw that we had made the right decision: there were winkles everywhere we looked, even on the beach right in front of the dinghy. It was the first time DJ had been to the Rhu and she was enchanted by it. Two baby otters loped along the top of the beach as we came ashore.
Once all three of us started work in earnest it was so good we didn’t even stop for lunch and bags of winkles were piling up on the beach. Finally the tide came in, so we sat down for our late picnic lunch and it was at this point that I noticed only Kelpie was with us. There was no sign of Tork or Bridie. I wasn’t too worried at first; they were probably looking for rabbits nearby and would turn up when we were due to leave. But there was still no sign of them by the time we had loaded our full bags and rucksacks onto the Heron and even ferried Kelpie over to the boat. We called, shouted and whistled with no response.
We had prolonged our stay at the Rhu by at least two hours longer than we should have done and the sea was rising all the time. The sunlight had gone and we noticed that a great bank of ominous-looking cloud was piling up on the horizon, hiding the sun. It was only in little, irregular puffs at first, but the wind was shifting round to the southwest too. In a surprisingly short space of time the wind was sending short, stiff, white-topped waves into the little cove. The Heron jerked alarmingly on her anchor-rope in the shallow-bottomed bay. The Rhu began to take on a dour and forbidding aspect, and I realised we had to make a major decision. What was more important: Jill, DJ, myself and the boat, or the two missing dogs? The Heron would not be safe where she was for much longer and it was not a good place to be stranded; there was no decent shelter. DJ wanted to stay overnight to wait for Bridie and Tork, but we couldn’t take the risk of the weather being good enough to pick her up next day. This part of Skye is completely exposed to the Atlantic – all the way to America.
I decided we would have to leave the dogs. However, Jill suggested a compromise: we should motor as close as we could along the coastline and keep a lookout for them. We piled into the thrashing Heron, a very unhappy group. I started the engine and Jill hauled up the anchor while Kelpie sat quietly and patiently in the stern, next to the tiller. We travelled along the Cuillin side of the coast peering at the hilltops, looking for signs of movement, and it seemed an age before Jill shouted: ‘There they are!’
She was pointing to the top of a very high cliff near the base of the Cuillin Mountains, several miles southeast of the Rhu. Two minute little black dots were running like the wind along the cliff edge, heading our way. The dogs must have heard the Heron’s engine and realised they’d been left behind. There was absolutely nowhere to land the dinghy as the cliffs plunged straight down into the sea and the dogs could not have got down from the top of the cliff anyway. All we could do was turn around and look for a place where we could collect the dogs. Just before we neared the Rhu, we saw a gully with a waterfall and a flat rock at the bottom of it that looked a likely spot. I held the boat off while Jill got the rubber dinghy over the side into the slapping, choppy water. She and DJ set off towards the gully, Jill rowing. Tork quickly caught on to the plan; he ran along the cliff top and plunged down the steep gully onto the flat rock long before Bridie picked up the courage to do it. The sea rose and fell steeply, sucking at the base of the cliff. It was far too steep and rough to land the boat so Jill had to be careful that the dinghy wasn’t tipped up or thrown against the rocks. Tork jumped into the dinghy without difficulty, but it took a long time to persuade Bridie to do the same. I finally saw her scramble awkwardly into the dinghy and they were at last making their laborious way back to the Heron.
A very subdued crowd of people and dogs eventually reached Soay. We decided it would be best to moor the Heron in the harbour as the tide was in and it was the nearest and safest shelter from the Rhu. We walked back home much, much later than we had originally planned. As we passed Soay House, Tex poked his head out of the front door, suspiciously.
‘You’re very late, aren’t you?’
‘There was a bit of a delay,’ I mumbled, scuttling past. I did not want to elaborate.
The weather went down for the rest of the week with a strong southwesterly gale. If DJ had stayed overnight at the Rhu, we would not have been able to pick her up for another five or six days.
It wasn’t always so hazardous. There is one early morning Heron trip I will always remember with pleasure. It was mid-February during a good spell of cold, quiet, frosty weather. The night before, I had made an arrangement to meet my winkle buyer at Elgol jetty for half past nine in the morning. I had to get up early to collect some bags on the other side of the bay and rowed out in the dinghy to get them just before it was light. The air was fresh and cold and very still, an occasional star winked out to the north in a dark blue-black sky and on the eastern horizon there was just a hint of pale primrose yellow behind the black-edged mountains. By the time I had collected the bags and was rowing back to the Heron, the primrose yellow was tinted rose pink around the edges and spreading outwards from east to south. I set the Heron towards Elgol and about halfway between Soay and Skye the sun suddenly burst out from behind the mountains. It washed over the Skye hills and Cuillin Mountains, painting them with light and colour. The sea danced with a million tiny sparkles. All that was missing was a heavenly choir. It was a stunning moment. That’s my kind of commuting.
CHAPTER TWENTY
/> Shipping forecast
You can never be sure when the weather will change in the Hebrides and it can change dramatically many times in one day. In my first few years I had seen all sorts of different weather conditions. Enough to make sure that I had written down the compass bearings from Soay bay to Elgol and back again, and then from the bay to the harbour and vice versa. I had also roughly timed the journeys so that, in the event of a sudden mist or fog while I was in the Heron, I should at least have some way of navigating my way around if land was not visible. It was very crudely written and in my own personal code which made sense only to me. I was not sure how to write the bearings in a professional, nautical manner so I would add little reminders such as ‘90 degrees plus two and a half points to the right of East’. I kept the piece of paper with the bearings written on it in a plastic bag in the pocket of my waterproof jacket along with a tiny hand-compass. The only timepiece I owned was a battery-powered travelling alarm clock. That was also stuffed into my waterproof jacket pocket whenever I used the boat. The Heron was fitted with a very good compass inside a waterproof marine-ply wooden box just in front of the tiller, but I kept the little compass with me just as a precaution. That was all the navigation equipment we had on board.
Luckily, there were not many occasions when I needed to test my screwball calculations. There was one time, however, when I was very glad I had taken the time to make them. Tex had been away for a few weeks and one evening he telephoned Jill to see if Peter could pick him up from Elgol the following day. Jill and I had taken Peter over to Skye only a few days earlier and the Heron was tucked away on her mooring in the harbour. It was late November, the weather unpredictable and cold with occasional snow flurries and the mountaintops were dusted in white. The shipping forecast for Malin and Hebrides the next day predicted a southwesterly wind ‘four to five, occasionally six’ with snow later on. The Heron was quite capable of dealing with these conditions so Jill told Tex that we would pick him up in the afternoon.