"In every place, where there is any thing worthy of observation, there should be a short printed directory for strangers, such as we find in all the towns of Italy, and in some of the towns in England”. The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson. James Boswell, 1785, Ed RW Chapman, Oxford University Press, 1970.
"All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own, and if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it". A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Samuel Johnson, 1775, Ed RW Chapman, Oxford University Press, 1970.
This guide is primarily for anyone who cruises (by sail, or by motor if you must) between the Mull of Kintyre and the south coast of Skye. It may also be useful for people who travel by land because so much of this part of Scotland is near the sea.
It is definitely not about how to get to the anchorages which is so well described in the excellent Clyde Cruising Club Sailing Directions and on the Antares Charts. But, like Johnson's need for a 'short printed directory for strangers', it is about what to see and do after you have anchored or, these days increasingly and rather boringly, tied up to a mooring buoy or a pontoon. So it is dedicated to those hardy folk who still leap forward to pull up the anchor while the skipper shouts encouragement, or abuse. Indeed, trying to combine sailing directions with what I am trying to do here is a mistake. The books become too big and glossy, the rocks get obscured by the pubs as it were, and they are not at all easy to fold over to the correct page, and weigh down with a winch handle in the cockpit as you enter a tricky anchorage. They are coffee not chart table books.
I suppose it must have been in the mid 1990s that I realised there was a gap in the information for sailors on the west coast of Scotland, and indeed in many other places as well. The Clyde Cruising Club Sailing Directions tell you how to get to the anchorages, where the rocks are, where to anchor and so on. Tourist and travel books are all well and good, but tend to ignore the places you can only get to by boat, and anyway they are written largely for people in cars (and get out of date rather fast). Reference books are mostly too bulky to keep on board. In short, there was and amazingly still is, a gap in the middle — a concise and accessible account of what to see and do when you get to an anchorage (not just lounge about on board drinking and eating without even bothering to inflate the dinghy). Of course you can load your boat up with various books, but they take up space, some you wouldn't want to risk getting wet, and anyway there would be too much searching about to find what you wanted. And crucially these days, the internet provides connectivity to a whole host of useful websites at the click of a mouse.
And to be sure, there really is loads to see and do, unlike in the early 18th century when Daniel Defoe wrote: " ... we did not go over to those islands personally, neither was it likely any person whose business was mere curiosity and diversion, should either be at the expense, or run the risk of such a hazardous passage where there was so little worth observation to be found" (A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain. Daniel Defoe, originally published 1724-6, abridged and edited by Pat Rogers, Penguin, London, 1971). Not true! However, it was not until after Boswell and Johnson's famous tour in 1773 ( A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Samuel Johnson, 1775, Ed RW Chapman, Oxford University Press, 1970) that people began to realise what treasures there were to be seen, followed by the explosion in rather up-market Highland tourism in the 19th century inspired by Walter Scott and Queen Victoria who made one of her homes in Balmoral Castle.
What are my credentials for this self-imposed task? Well, I was a neurologist all my professional life but that did include a lot of writing (of books and papers) and editing (of a scientific journal for 10 years). And I have sailed in the area since 1959 when my father chartered an old wooden boat on the Clyde for a week. Then, from 1974 I chartered every year before buying my own boat (with a good friend and colleague in Dundee) in 1988 when I moved from Oxford to Edinburgh for reasons which were not entirely unconnected with sailing in what is undoubtedly the best cruising area in the British Isles, probably in Europe, and maybe in the world.
It is indeed odd how sometimes when I am sitting at anchor I catch myself imagining there is a time difference between the west coast of Scotland and the rest of the country, so much so that I wonder what the time is back at home in Edinburgh. This must be to do with the other-worldness of the West Coast, or maybe because to me it has so often been associated with holidays in distant Scotland when I lived in land-locked Oxford. Indeed, a weekend on the boat still feels like a holiday. Amazingly much of what I describe on this website is physically connected to England by road and rail, you could walk it from London if you had the time. And yet England feels very far away.
Although I worry a bit, I doubt if this guide will lead to loads of boats cluttering up small and obscure anchorages which happen to have something interesting about them. After all, there are so many, 266 in this area alone, and many more to come. As Frank Cowper noted over a century ago "The west coast of Scotland is certainly not deficient in harbours. On the contrary, for one who desires to describe them all conscientiously, there are almost too many" (Sailing Tours: The Yachtsman's Guide to the Cruising Waters of the English and Adjacent Coasts, Part V, The West Coasts of Scotland, the Orkneys, and the west coast of the North Sea. Frank Cowper, Upcott Gill, London, 1896). What is more, many boats hardly leave their pontoons, and a lot of those that do — and the charter boats — tend to head for the honeypot anchorages like Tobermory, Arinagour, Canna, Loch Drumbuie, Loch Aline, Puilladobhrain and the Tinker's Hole. Indeed, someone I know never cooks on board, and only goes to places where he can go out for a meal! Besides, why should only the select few have access to all these wonderful places? Luckily the entire population of the UK is unlikely to arrive all at once. And nor are we going to be cluttered up by motor homes as is the case on the too hyped North Coast 500. But there are still environmental issues. What will all the anchoring do to the ecology of the seabed? Where will all the plastic waste end up? What will be the effect on the bird and marine mammal populations? What might the chemicals in antifouling do to the seas and oceans?