Next morning, Thursday 9 August, We headed off. We were planning to go to Plockton, it’s seemingly a lovely wee place and Gordon had been there in the 80’s on his motor bike during Scotland’s illustrious world cup campaign. So off we went at about 8am, feeling pretty shattered after our sleepless night but off we went anyway. We were sailing down, heading for the Raasay narrows when two things happened: a pod of about fifty dolphins swam alongside and all around the boat, jumping as high as our foredeck and swimming in our bow wave, it was amazing! Gordon didn’t get to see much of this as the wind died and shortly thereafter so did our engine……. with a whoosh & a bang! With no wind and no power we were now drifting towards a lateral marker with a rock behind it…great, just what we needed. (Ed Note Louise still enthralled with Dolphins at this point even though she might be swimming with them soon!)
There was nothing else to do but call up Stornoway coastguard and ask for some assistance from any local vessels. A yacht that was in the vicinity came to our aide and towed us back to Portree, so thank you very much to the skipper and crew of K Vector III. She was a yacht on a skippered charter and 2 visitors from Germany who thoroughly enjoyed the whole episode. We e-mailed our thanks that night to the charter Skippers company .
Gordon did all the usual checks and replaced filters, bled system but to no avail. We were on a mooring buoy that couldn’t have been further from the shore, so into the dinghy we went to get some help. Would you believe it, the outboard for the dinghy decided to pack in on us as well so rowing it was, lol.
Anyway, we got ashore and talked to a few people, and a lovely man called Tommy form the RNLI came out to the boat to help Gordon, he wasn’t even on duty, I think he had just passed by on some other business. They both worked away at it for a couple of hours and were unsuccessful, however they determined that it was most likely the cylinder head gasket had blown and salt water had got into the oil somehow. Not a small job!
Tommy very kindly gave us one of his moorings to stay on FOC, closer to the pier head, right next to the RNLI lifeboat, as it looked like we were going to be here for some time.
Tommy is a fisherman in his day job and has two moorings for his boats. Gordon commented that he thought our boat weighed about 5 tons and would this be ok for the mooring? Tommy’s said with a bit of a grin on his face, he thought it would be ok, his boats are 32 ton!
We were towed there the next morning by George from the RNLI.
