Arbroath to Inverness

Visitors in Arbroath, we quite liked them until they decided to move in,

Bob put a picture on Facebook, moaning that they hadn't even laid any eggs for us. The following day the harbour master arrived with a package addressed to Tehari II, someone had sent us six duck eggs wrapped in bubble wrap. Amazingly they had arrived whole and unbroken and were lovely and tasty for breakfast next morning. Thanks Gerald!!

We left Arbroath at 7.15 for the thirty hour trip to Inverness, aiming to make full use of the gap between two 'unseasonally deep atlantic lows'. Since we had visited all the harbours on route by car whilst waiting for the force ten to blow through, we didn't think we would be missing anything by just going for it.

We left in hardly any wind and had to motor for the first hour but then it picked up nicely to gusts of 20-25 knots right behind us. The boat surfed nicely, averaging 8 knots with regular speeds above 10 and one very impressive 11 appearing on the speedo.

The result of that was that we made the trip quicker than expected and could have reached the infamous Rattray Head with the tide against us, and against the wind. We called in to Peterhead for a few hours    
to wait for the tide to change and managed to get a few hours sleep before setting out again.

The rest of the passage consisted of the usual contrasts that we have come to expect some fairly strong winds, some periods of no wind, bright sunshine at times and heavy squalls just a few minutes later.
We knew the Moray Firth was beautiful because of our car trip, which was just as well because doing it in the dark and occassional fog we couldn't fully appreciate its majestic splendour and rugged isolation.
We only saw one other boat the whole trip and that was Reiner, the German guy we met in Arbroath who is doing the same trip.    

The fishing fleets from the many little harbour towns have all but disappeared, which is tragic really. Nor was there another single boat in the Firth appraching the Inverness road bridge.

The Firth was spectaculary beautiful but the weather meant that the pictures didn't do it justice. The sun is out today, we intend to stay in the Seaport Marina until tomorrow to rest, reprovision and explore and head into the canal proper tomorrow.