There and back again

I decided to pop back to see friends and family. After Easter, everything gets busy here with guests and workshops, so I thought I’d make a dash for it before, as if in a whirlwind, I land on the floor in July. I walked off the island in a horizontal hailstorm that, if I had been walking in a westerly direction instead of eastwards, I would still be bearing the pockmarks on my face. I am asking much of the Yaris these days. The poor thing stands in salty rain for weeks of inactivity and then has to stump up and do a return trip of nearly 1,000 miles.

It is the week before the Easter break, when the tourist season proper starts, and already CalMac is cancelling ferries like the BBC cancels 1970s DJs. I don’t even try to get the Mull to Oban ferry, instead heading past Craignure to the beautifully named Fishnish, where a modest open ferry operates in calmer waters. It is pleasant, but the prospect of an extra two and a half hours of burnt fuel doesn’t excite. However, I only have to make it to Oban, as I am staying on a yacht with someone I’ve never met but who has been to Erraid many times and did offer a bed whenever to any Erraidians that might be in need.

Stefan is a taciturn German with paint-sodden clothes and huge, square sailor’s hands. It quickly becomes apparent that idle chit-chat is not his thing, but we do manage to bond over multi-layer, salt-resistant resin solutions for small jetties. A self-proclaimed lifestyle pirate (make of that what you will!), it strikes me that he could be a great person to share half a bottle of whisky with, given the candour with which he describes the more unlikely maritime outcomes that he has encountered. However, I had an early start the next morning.

The mountains behind Oban were half covered with new snow, and it was hard to keep on the right side of the road at 6.15am, pre-coffee, for the sheer spectacle of it.

I won’t be doing Oban to Stroud again in a day. Everything went smoothly, but at just over nine hours’ travel time, including the obligatory stop at Tebay Services, it’s just too much of a schlep to do it all at once. And, while it was lovely, what is four full days when you take travel into account? It’s just too short to do and see everything and everyone—properly, anyway.

For a break from our small island, on Easter Sunday we decided to have an outing to a much smaller island. This was actually reviving an old Easter Sunday tradition. We borrowed some children who were staying at the croft, who were excited at the prospect of exploring an uninhabited island, loaded up with flasks of tea and coffee, and made the 15-minute journey on Oranja, our small orange winter boat. After alighting, we played hide and seek while one of us hid things that might pass for an egg hunt—things hastily wrapped in foil: some cookies, some smooth, flat stones. Island resourcefulness is a wonder!

One of the children exclaimed that they had found a message in a bottle. There were chuckles from the more sedentary adults, until a bottle was produced that definitely had a rolled-up bit of paper in it. It was a crumpled-up plastic bottle, turning opaque from the salt water, and not one of those nice glass bottles with a cork in that comes bobbing towards you in your dreams. But never mind! The novelty of finding a real message in a bottle sent a charge of excitement through the now much more attentive group. The paper was carefully extracted and unfurled to reveal a handwritten message of the strangest kind. Instead of the co-ordinates for buried treasure or a plea for rescue from one of the lesser Pitcairn Isles, the main body of the message was an address which, if you registered there, would send you a quarterly religious magazine. The address was headed ‘Jessie Duplantis Ministries’, which Google told me was a TV evangelist church. I suppose this was not a great surprise, us being so close to Iona and all. Still, something with more romance would have been nice.

Back on Erraid, we settled into that lovely tiredness that follows open air sea travel. Then we remembered that we had to make something for dinner that included as many eggs as possible as the chickens have gone from zero to 25 eggs per day in the last week. No one knows the reason for this. Maybe they were just intent on making Easter as memorable as possible! Frittata is it then…again!