Hope you all like our new BLOG page. I bet not many people can say that they were sailing in the week before Christmas!! Well I was!! Charlie Menzies who does all our major maintenance has just bought a fantastic boat called K'ung Fu-Tse. She is a 1974 Aluminium hulled 25 tons 50 foot long JUNK!!! I helped Charlie bring her down from Inverness through the Caledonian Canal. We started out last Sunday and had a fantastic trip down Loch Ness - no monsters!!- to Fort Augustus. Monday morning we went up the flight of locks then down to Loch Oich where the fog came in really thick. The loch is very shallow and we had absolutely NO instruments or chart but we crept through the narrows and eventually stopped at the Great Glen Waterpark. On the Tuesday morning we had a great trip down Loch Lochy to Charlie's moorings at Gairlochy.
Charlie plans to use the boat for skippered charters and thinks he has about a year's work to get her up to scratch!! I just hope that he doesn't forget the work he has to do on FIGMENT, FREEDOM and FANTOM before the end of March!!!
Swimming with dolphins? Not quite, but the Lochaber Watersports May 2006 adventure to St Kilda had us sailing with dolphins. A wonderful experience, as we set out across the Sound of Eriskay on a calm, still evening for a night passage to St Kilda.
See a wee bit of the video for yourself at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_0XJXm5bEg
Alec Blanc skippers yacht "Figment III" and the video is taken from yacht "Freedom" skippered by Dave Hannah. On the helm of the video, Laurence Young.
The crew sailed overnight, and made landfall at St Kilda across a flat sea, 5.30am.