When the rain ceased I picked out all the putty round the skylight windows with a chisel, while the Crew followed me, cleaning and reputtying. With the sun shining, the bay, tricked out in wooded slopes and shimmering yachts, looked a lovely sight, and life a dancing holiday. Gloom and sunlight: perhaps you need the one for the other, and whenever you get too much of the one, the other seems very precious. The Crew, with shattering extravagance, presented a young lettuce to the swan. ‘After all the dry biscuits and things,’ she explained. The swan agreed. Then she drew my attention to the beauty of the gulls, as they circled and heeled, very white in the sun. ‘You had better give them some of your “Macnair’s Crax”’, I suggested, referring to a private hoard of very special biscuits. But she only laughed. If she did not care so much for things that crept or leapt or flew or grew it would make life simpler often.

She had a new oilskin cloth sort of decoration for the cabin walls behind the bunks. ‘Its pure white tones with the pantry box,’ she observed. ‘It will keep away any drips, too.’ Clearly she had not been idle ashore while we had slaved away at the engine. If only we had been able to get the boat on to a slipway, we should probably have found the offending nail or two responsible for the bilge leak. However, the amount coming in was not alarming and the new pump was working effectively. Actually the boat had been very little used in her long life—apart from the last two or three years in Skye—and under Mr. Ogilvy’s ownership she had been oiled and varnished so thoroughly that I at last understood why paint chipped easily off her hull. A simple all-round overhaul and she would still be an excellent sea boat. When my brother arrived for ten days, we were ready to give her a further trial.

XI

Round the Caliach

A westerly wind was blowing gently over Tobermory, but the sky looked stormy. A yachtsman of a ten tonner assured us that the west of Mull would be ‘uncomfortable’ for our boat; and, as it turned out, he was right. However, we wanted to be off, for we had now been a good week in Tobermory, and though we had enjoyed its variety very well, we felt we could do with a more secluded anchorage.

Not until we had rounded Ardmore Point and put her on the Caliach, did we feel the real sea. Here the white caps were racing over a vivid deep sparkling blue, and with the forward plunge—for the wind was about sou’west and head on —the passage was alive with exhilarating movement. And now I could enjoy it in the proper holiday mood, for my brother (whom the Crew dubbed the Mate) was used to heavy seas in a small boat, and I suppose responsibility does account for some leakage of vitality over a long run. Soon we opened out Ardnamurchan and the full length of our old friend, the Scuir of Eigg, with dents in its upturned keel. Then Rum, Canna, low to the sea, and, beyond, the hills of Skye. Westward, the Cairns of Coll, Coll itself, with a dull glitter on its bare rocks as they ran into Tiree. If, when we came abreast of Caliach Point, we should find a beam sea too uncomfortable for us, we had made up our minds to keep heading into it until we fetched Loch nan Eathar in Coll, where there is a good anchorage in a westerly wind.