A Scotsman, an Englishman and an Irishman : Day 14

To leave Crinan and head North you have either go a long way South before turning North. Or you head East out into the Sound of Jura to navigate a tight tidal race called the Dorus Mor. In Spring Tide this race, with whirlpools and eddys, can run at speeds of 8 knots. The typical speed of a sailing yacht is 6 to 7 knots, so you can’t get through, and worse can lose steering in the narrow channel with rocks beckoning. So respect and care is required. In addition, once you are through there are a number of other obstacles in the Sound itself so going with the tide North is the ideal.

We found ourselves therefore having to leave around 11 am and to get out, we also needed to get the Sea Lock at Crinan to open. Once open, the recycle time for the lock, can be considerable. So around 9.35am when we saw another yacht enter the lock to go down, we had a race against time to ready our yacht for sea, and to get into the lock before it closed. We managed the whole turnaround in about 10 minutes from realising we could get locked in, to being in the lock ready to go down. Impressed? We were!

We passed through the Dorus Mor just as the tide was slack, it was a bit of an anticlimax as it was pretty smooth. But that was the way we wanted it. We then had a leisurely sail up to Oban arriving around 3.45pm for 27 miles run, with the tide most of the way.

Oban is the gateway to the Western Isles with loads of ferry traffic to avoid it also has a round building called McCaig’s Tower above the town that is unique. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCaig%27s_Tower. In Oban we decided to have an Indian Curry as we suspect we won’t get a good one on the islands. That was the excuse, we might have to substantiate our hypothesis by trying one 😇.