After the few nights on a shore bed, it was surprisingly pleasant to be back on the water again, feeling the swing of the boat, hearing the night birds cry, and watching the glass falling. The rain was terrific that first night, and at 3 a.m. I was back at the old game of stopping a leak and making a hot drink (and liking its flavour no better). We both slept profoundly and awoke to a windy sea.

Presently a ship’s dinghy, bobbing like a cork, was discerned making its way towards us, and when I was handed a telegram, I only thanked the thin dapper grey-clipped man, with the yachting cap. He saluted and swung away again, shipping little more than a broken wave-top, and so danced back to land. Quite a remarkable performance, and in my astonishment I had shown a lamentable lack of hospitality. ‘Pretty smart postal service!’ said the Crew.

But I discovered him again on the beach, whittling a wooden stock for a small anchor, and we had a real sea talk. He asked me, in the usual Highland way, where I had come from. I told him and said it had been blowing pretty hard.

He agreed, adding, ‘But of course you would know the passage in?’

‘No, I came in on the chart—and was troubled a bit because the scale was small.’

‘The Ardnamurchan to Small Isles chart?’

‘Yes.’

He looked at me. ‘You’ll have a good crew with you?’

‘Just my wife.’

The hands with the stick dropped a foot. ‘You are the hardy gentleman,’ said he. And even if he had meant foolhardy (which he didn’t quite), I was still prepared to extract flattery out of it!

He had once been yachtsman to a certain gentleman on this coast, he told me, and had got him to build a special craft for it. She was fifty feet long but with no greater draught than three feet six inches. The right thing for some of these lochs with their shoal water, as I would understand. ‘Well, one afternoon along he comes and says we were leaving for Oban at six o’clock that night. I told him we couldn’t leave because it was blowing too hard. He laughed at me. So he was thinking I might be frightened, perhaps? I said no more. Very good. We set out. But rounding Ardnamurchan in the dark she would go over so far that you couldn’t see in the world how she would ever right herself. . . I am glad to say it wasn’t me only that was frightened then.’

This was very encouraging, but better was to follow, for he told me that when he himself was in doubt or difficulty over an entrance or picking up a perch or a buoy, the strain upon him became such that he could not speak to anyone. As my sympathy was very real, he there on the foreshore relived the very mood, until words failed him, and half-turning to the sea he made a gesture with the wooden stick and shook his head. How I wished the Crew had been there!