Muckdate 2: Not Quite Getting It (or rather, There)
Friday morning, looking towards Rum and Eigg - what a corker!
I am writing this with the baby asleep on my lap on an absolutely breathtaking Muck morning - still, clear, cool but not too cold. Opposite the living room window the mountains on Rum are snowy white against the pale pink sky which is slowly fading to creamy blue with the sunrise, and if I turn my head slightly to look out of the kitchen window the sgurr of Eigg is sprinkled with snow, backed by the same beautiful sky.
It's a week since we left our life in Fife - though only five days since we arrived on Muck! In theory, the journey should take about 7 hours - 4 hours of driving to Mallaig followed by 2-3 hours on the ferry - but ours was rather longer. In fact, it took us from 1pm on Friday to 1pm on Monday, a 72-hour epic that gave us our first salutary lesson of island life: the weather is in charge and there's nothing you can do about it.
Before we left I'd been warned that strong winds from the Atlantic make it difficult for boats to come into the harbour on Muck, as it is a narrow channel lined with rocks angled to the south-west. For the preceding week I'd been obsessively checked the weather and shipping forecasts, and it wasn't looking good for our booked sailing on Saturday. Friday, however, was looking lovely and calm, with winds from the north-west, so on Wednesday I telephoned our landlady and asked if she'd mind us arriving a day early. She thought that was a good plan, and advised that I call the ferry office straight away to see if there was space for us on that sailing. The MV Loch Nevis, scheduled to call at Muck 4 times a week, can only take a very limited amount of vehicular traffic. Unfortunately, the Friday sailing was fully booked, and there's no boat on a Sunday - and so we had no choice but to press ahead with our original plans.
We left Fife on Friday lunchtime, car absolutely laden to the gunwhales with everything we thought a family of four (including a rapidly growing baby in nappies and an artistic 4-year-old who can get through a box of paper in a week) might need in the coming three months. As Muck has no shop, we also had a fair amount of food - a normal week's shop for the four of us, plus a few extra bags of long-life store cupboard essentials in case bad weather meant that the ferry couldn't bring supplies from the mainland. We'd been warned that the island can be cut off for up to a week by winter storms, so having a spare week's food in hand seemed like a sensible precaution.
We arrived at the bunkhouse in Arisaig about 5pm, and set about making dinner (a hungry 4-year-old makes nothing easier) and getting everything in place for the one night we thought we'd be staying. Our daughter was pretty giddy about sleeping in a bunkbed, and spent most of the evening climbing up and down the ladders pretending she was on a sailing ship. Nevertheless, we managed to get everyone into bed at a reasonable hour and set the alarm for 7am, giving us 3 hours to get dressed, fed, repacked into the car and drive the 10 minutes to the ferry terminal at Mallaig. Before I fell asleep I heard my phone ping with an automated notification regarding tomorrow's sailing to the Small Isles - 'Service will be liable to disruption or cancellation at short notice due to adverse weather.'
Waiting for the ferry at Mallaig.
Nevertheless, by the time we were sitting down to breakfast the ferry was still showing as running, so we packed up the circus and headed to Mallaig. I collected our tickets from the ferry office, then popped into the nearby Co-op to stock up on food items that wouldn't last long out of the fridge: milk, yoghurt, meat, fresh fruit. We were set to go, and as my husband reversed down the ramp to join the vans and pick-ups on the car deck, we all felt a thrill of excitement - we were actually going to Muck!
Coming through the sheltered bay between Mallaig and the islands was calm enough, but from the bow we could see white horses out in the sound and the boat's flag was flapping ferociously in the wind. Nevertheless we made steady progress towards Rum, and made a plan to eat our lunch whilst we were at anchor there, ahead of heading in to stormier conditions in the Sound. Breakfast baps devoured, we settled down in the centre of the observation lounge and braced ourselves for a livley crossing to Muck.
And lively it was. Having got talking to the harbourmaster on Rum, who was heading off the island for the weekend, he reckoned that the swell was about 6 metres and he'd only once made the crossing in worse conditions. Our 4-year-old was giggling with delight at all the rolling about, whilst the baby seemed to find the whole thing very relaxing and spend the voyage alternately sleeping on my lap or smiling at other passengers. My husband started to feel a wee bit queasy as we got to the middle of the Sound and the bow-to-stern roll really began to hit the high notes. But on we ploughed, and amazingly neither me or the children felt even the slightest bit sick.
In the Sound of Rum, battling the swell.
Then, as perhaps the hundredth huge wave smashed into the bow, the tannoy crackled into life and the captain announced that the weather was too dangerous to attempt to get into the harbours at Muck or Eigg. The winds were gusting at 66mph and the shipping forecast had been correct in its prediction of a 'very rough, occasionally high' sea state for Malin and the Hebrides. Instead we were heading back to Mallaig - and after a spicy couple of minutes turning the boat around in the middle of the Sound, that is exactly what we did. Though the turn itself was a little lively, the difference once we had the wind to our stern was amazing: the rolling all but ceased and we quickly steamed back into port.
The next crossing to Muck was on Monday morning, so as soon as we were back on dry land I raced to the ferry office and fortunately they were able to squeeze us on to that sailing. The bunkhouse had space for us for the intervening two nights (in fact we were the only guests booked in for the whole time - another piece of luck as usually they don't allow infants to stay in case they disturb other visitors), and so with good weather forecast for Monday - including a light wind from the north-west, hurrah - we decided to make the most of the enforced stopover and headed to the pub to reward ourselves for coming through our first west coast adventure.
