And the island has no anchorage for large yachts; is never by any stretch of the imagination likely to become a Society pleasure ground or meeting place. In fact, when we returned to our boat at Port-na-Fraing we found her rolling very uncomfortably and knew we could not sleep there, while if anything like a real sea got up, we might quickly enough find ourselves in difficulties. The Mate was still inclined to rub a shoulder, for he had got tossed out of bed, after we had first gone ashore, by a sudden sea impulse for which there had been no visible cause—probably the tail-end of some ninth wave dying in the Sound.

The entrance to the Bull Hole is from the south and not readily discernible until you are near the Mull shore, as the opening channel is barely a hundred yards wide. Hold by the Mull shore, for half-way up the channel there is a rock that shows only at low water. It lies about thirty feet S.E. of a very obvious rock on the Eilean na mBan side, opposite which the land on the Mull shore comes out to a point. At this point the south-going stream tends to be bottlenecked, and one can encounter for a short distance a disconcertingly strong current in a very narrow channel. The interest of making a new anchorage caught us up, and it was not lessened by seeing a yacht many times our size taking up all the available and recommended holding ground a cable-length beyond the point on the Eilean na mBan side. But as the channel widened we turned to starboard into a little bay, where there is deep water right into the very shore. After two attempts we found the mathematically perfect spot, which kept us out of the main run of the tide, while giving a reasonable clearance of each arm of the rocky bay. ‘Two fathoms,’ said the Crew. There was hardly a movement on the water and we slept a perfect sleep.

We got quite an affection for this little anchorage of the Bull Hole, which had, behind its northern rocks, looked so forbidding, and carried out all sorts of deep-sea fishing experiments, though with little success. The Mate was particularly fertile in making night lines and using many kinds of bait from crushed partan to boiled limpet. And when a seal came to visit us he was more than ever convinced that fish of some sort were about. Occasionally in the days that followed, a cobble, with outboard motor, threaded its way in through the northern rocks, and saluted us as it passed southward to meet the steamer with whatever salmon the nets on the north of the Ross may have yielded. ‘It’s easy seeing what the seal was after,’ said the Mate, who made me pull that dinghy until there were blisters between my fingers, while he ran the gamut of all my rubber eels, spoons, and minnows, and with a few gull’s feathers turned my bare hooks into mackerel flies.