It has been a busy 10 days to get Kincsem ready for the 2023 season.  As always, I had a long list of to do items to get through.  When I arrived, the  boat appeared to be in very good shape except for one thing:  the water emanating from the water tank was brown and had a foul smell and taste.  This was a surprise since I had cleaned the tank and filled it up with fresh water before I left her for the winter and I had also added standard water treatment chemicals.  What I had not understood, however, was that the water in Craobh is very peaty which may be good for making whiskey but not water tanks!   This means it has suspended in it brown peat particles which will coat the walls of the tank and apparently start a fermentation process!  For some reason, these particles did not show up when I tested the water with my water tester in the fall.  Well, it took a full day to clean the tanks and flush them with bleach a couple of times.  Now I know where all the inspection ports for the tank are!  I did not want to refill the tanks with the same peaty water so I waited to refill them until i had fixed the water maker.  For that, I needed to reinstall the watermaker control panel, which took half a day but overall, was a surprisingly easy job.  

The water tanks were not the only item added to the long  to do list but at the end of the 10 days I had set aside to get her ready, Kincsem was ready to go.    And not all was work.  There were several nice dinners at the local pub and a dinner at the house of Simon and Sally Currin with special guest Reverend Bob Shepton.  Simon is the Commodore of the OCC and the house is full of phantastic pictures of their cruises to Greenland.  Bob claims to be the only minister who has run aground both in the Artic and the Antartic (on his 35 foot Westerly called Dodo’s Delight)!  Check out his two books available on Amazon!

Paul, my first crew, joined me in Craobh Haven for the short sail to Oban.  My old friends Rita and John joined in Oban and we were off to this little bay called Puilladohrain.  I know you cannot pronounce it.  I cannot either.  But Paul says it’s pronounced “Pulldorin.”  

The anchorage at Puilladhorain

So why anchor here?  Paul is our source of local knowledge on this leg, being a sailboat owner who lives in Glasgow and has cruised these parts of the Hebrides many times.  He does not only know how to pronounce the name, he also knows the little restaurant by the apparently famous “Bridge across the Atlantic” where we had a lovely seafood dinner.  It is called Tig an Truish, which is Gaelic for “the house of the pants”.  It is here where the Scots living on the island many years ago put on pants before crossing the bridge so that they would blend in with the English on the other side of the bridge.  When they came back across the bridge, the traditional Scottish kilts were retrieved and the pants stored until the next crossing!

The Bridge over the Atlantic