Hi all, well we've been hiding from some rather nasty weather of late. After our anchoring excitement (if that is the correct phrase!) we headed out of Ardfern to Jura and picked up a community mooring buoy, with the intention of getting ashore early next morning for an explore and visit the Jura whiskey distillery.
However the weather gods had other plans, and next morning when checking the forecast (an onboard ritual), there was a Force 11 (yes I did say eleven!) predicted in the offshore sea area nearest to us,
with the possibility of Force 9 winds winds gusting to force 10 in our inshore area. A crew conference decided that we really didn't want to be on a mooring buoy in that sort of weather, so gave up our shore trip to get
ourselves to Port Ellen, on Islay and into a little community owned marina (which is still exposed) to ride out the storm.
A nasty little motor into force 5 and 6 winds with the seas building to short steep waves saw us arrive in Port Ellen and thankfully find a berth that had enough water for us. We were hugely disappointed not to get ashore at Jura, but will perhaps try again in the future.
Once in Port Ellen the crew went into full storm preparation, doubling some lines up on the boat and even trebling some of the springs holding us off the pontoon. Once we knew that we could do nothing else for Emerald and that she was as safe as we could possibly make her, we did the only rational thing we could think of as we waited for the storm's approach. We went whiskey tasting of course to two distillieries to the north of the island.
The staff were welcoming and after very large tasting measures in both of them we headed back to the boat, with several treasures for the newly designed whiskey locker. The wind thankfully peaked at thirty five knots,
so we had dodged a bullet.
A boat got in from Jura the day after us and had spent a very uncomfortable night in the mooring field, so we knew we had taken the right decision to run for cover.

We are still on Islay, waiting on a break in the weather to get across to Northern Ireland, and it now looks like we can make a dash between Islay and Glenarm on Wednesday 25th, and on to Carrickfergus on Friday 27th. There are still a couple of very nasty weather systems barrelling out of the Atlantic towards us, so we have to be careful especially as the tides, overfalls and whirlpools (no really) around the Mull of Kintyre can be treacherous for a small boat.
We are again waiting for a weather system to hit us tonight/tomorrow at Islay (currently 30 knots), then we'll perhaps go to a couple more distilleries tomorrow (storm tactics remember), before getting ready for the crossing early the next day.
Rumours that I've influenced the weather to allow us to stay on Islay this long are strictly untrue!!
We have perhaps another 8 or so passages to complete before reaching our winter quarters in Falmouth towards the end of September.

I've worked it out to be roughly 400 Nm to get there, and another 3 countries to visit! (including a stop in Dublin for a decent pint of Guinness or six).

I hope our friends Mark and Anne on Midday Sun and Rich and Clare on Peggy are hunkered down at the minute in the River Fal in Cornwall as it looks like they too are getting a pasting from the weather Gods, so much for the British summer time, I definitely think the seasons have shifted, can't remember the last time we had a decent August in Blighty. I just had to do a quick round of the boat again to check lines as the weather is definitely deteriorating here again.

Photo is of Nichola sizing up the Bowmore tastings we tried. We ended up liking the Mariner over the 12 year old, but the decision took a while!

Slainte
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PS Matty good to hear from you fella, love to the ladies

PPS we've spent today also reviewing our winter work list....more of this later