‘You were surely in an awful hurry.’

And we found ourselves without an answer. In fact, though all that had been done to her could, to my inexperienced eye, have been done in two or three afternoons any time in the last six weeks, I was made to feel guilty and did my best to explain that we were anxious to take advantage of the presence of a carpenter about the hotel who would put in some shelving and locker accommodation. A floor board over the propeller shaft was missing, and I was told the owner would have put a new one in had I not been in such an inexplicable haste. I expressed my sorrow for that. Moreover, there had not been enough time to stow the ballast properly or quite finish the painting, while the engine throttle still needed a spring and one or two other things needed adjustment. Besides that, the old magneto had been damaged by salt water, but there was a borrowed one in her and she was going well enough. By salt water? Had the boat’s plug been left out? Hsh! said a shaken head.

Feeling confused and more guilty than ever, as if I were altogether to blame, I tried to put everyone at his ease, for perhaps I had been in too great a hurry, and anyway this was my own boat and I had not yet got to know her. So we lifted anchor, the mechanic swung the flywheel, and there was a roar.

After the soft hush of a motor car, it was an impressive, an obliterating sound. I sat beside the mechanic in the cabin and tried to catch what he shouted into my ear and sometimes succeeded, though a dumb show of feeling the circulation system and cylinder heads, pointing to the oil-drip feed and the throttle, indicating forward, neutral, and reverse, was more immediately intelligible. Then he gave her the load, and as I stepped out to the cockpit, we were under way, with Eoin at the tiller and the small boat in tow.

The land began slipping past. We were headed for Fladdachuain, confused once in the remote past with Tír na n-Óg, the Land of the Ever Young, the Gaelic paradise.

But we did not land there. We were hardly prepared for Tír na n-Óg yet, despite all our experiments with time, so we put her about and came back to Skye, the basaltic masses of the Quirang behind Ruadha Hunish—a magnificent side-face of rock running into the sea, with the coastguard’s lookout perched on its brow. She was going well, steady on the helm, as I brought her in between the rocks off Hulm Island and so back to her anchorage.

The two anchors had folding stocks and we decided to put both out, for this can be an uncomfortable berth when a sea-wind comes down the channel. With the larger anchor, some difficulty was experienced in getting the pin into its hole in the stock. It was hammered, but went little more than half way home; which might have been far enough, I thought, if only the binding wire had been fixed more securely. But unfortunately I said nothing. Eoin and I then took measurements inside for the use of the carpenter. By the time we had finished it was eight o’clock.