Gairloch was lovely, and we had a fine sunny day to head south down the Inner Sound and through the Skye Bridge to Kyle of Lochalsh. The small pontoon was crowded, there was just one space, on the inner side of the pontoon, in what looked like no water at all. A fellow yachtie appeared and encouraged us to go there, as there was enough depth. He was right, and we stayed there overnight, warping the boat round in the morning so she would be easier to get out of the confined space.

We set off through Kylerhea with the tide on Sunday afternoon, and sailed with genoa only for a long way down the Sound of Sleat, when the wind died and we motorsailed to Mallaig.

When we got there all the moorings were occupied, some with very small obviously locally-owned inflatables. The 12 'visitors' moorings aren't really that at all. We were invited to raft up to another yacht we had seen in Kyle, so we did so, and settled down for the night. Around four in the morning the forecast strong wind arrived. I couldn't get back to sleep so I got up and kept watch for a while, then went back to bed. Later, around 9am, the boat lurched suddenly and we knew that the mooring line had parted, and we were now tearing free from our ropes to the other boat. Very quickly we got the engine started, the crew of the other boat surfaced and helped us pull the ropes in again, so we could try to reconnect to the mooring buoy. After a lot of motoring forward and jousting with the Moorfast boathook, we managed to get a thin rope through the mooring buoy pickup, then replaced it by our wonderful rope and chain spliced mooring rope, tied it off over the bow roller, and relaxed a bit.

The large thick blue rope we had been attached to had simply unknotted itself over the hours we had been attached to it, and simply let go!

As the mooring our rafted-up boats were attached to was the rearmost in the harbour, we had only around thirty metres of water separating us from the shingle shore, and if our springs and stern line had parted at the same time before we could start the engine, well, we would have been in schtuck! But hey, it happened during daylight, not the middle of the night, and we had enough people to deal with the situation, so it was a success.

Mallaig's much-vaunted new pontoon layout is only now taking shape, but is not yet available for yachts to berth at. The project is running late, and we felt sorry for a number of yachts who came into the harbour today, in fairly choppy conditions, only to find that there were no available moorings for them, short of rafting up on a fishing boat, so they had to leave again and find another anchorage.

It is getting noticeably colder at nights now, and the high winds have accentuated that. Time to dig out the thermals again!

On TUesday we set off at 9am down towards Eigg and Muck and Ardnamurchan Point. Half the journey was under sail, for a change, as we had enough wind to sail by. By 3.30 we were in Tobermory, one week to the day since we left Stromness! How about that?