Sailing Scotland’s Caledonian Canal | Loch Ness & North Sea Adventure

In the last episode of Sailing So Far, I cruised in company with my brother Liam and my friend Sam and we entered the Caledonian Canal. This week we continue our journey through the canals, race down Loch Ness and enter a windy North Sea. Well good morning folks, we are through the lagging locks, we spent the night on the little pontoon just on the other side of it and now we're sailing through or motoring through this really beautiful stretch. with all these sort of fern trees either side and a beautiful background. We've got Aja just ahead of us. We're gonna push on through and get through Loch Oik today. I hope I'm saying that right. And then we'll see, maybe we go into Loch Ness this afternoon or maybe we stop just before that. We'll have to wait and see. We've got to decide kind of when we want to leave. The waterways really, there's some really strong weather coming in around the date that we're supposed to leave. We just need to figure out whether we want to spend our time inside the waterway where we're nice and safe or try and get into a marina on the other side. I don't really want to be swinging around my anchor in sort of 60 knots of wind potentially. I'm sure young Sam here wouldn't appreciate that either. But yeah, we'll just see how it goes. But for the moment, we're in a pretty beautiful spot. As we pass the Laggan Locks, Scott's Pines line the canal like old sentinels. Planted when the Caledonian Canal was first built and standing watch over these waters for more than two centuries. This particular area of the canal was a favourite for me and a memory I won't forget. I feel like what we're missing is horses to pull us along this kind of thing i could be here and instead of controlling a more control I could be going Dancer and Prancer and Vixen and Blitzen at Fort Augustus the Caledonian Canal spills down five locks towards Loch Ness step by step so far drops from the Great Glen into the famous waters part history part highland theater and all downhill from here We are just creeping along the loch. Luckily for me, I've got Sam up top, holding on to my bow, acting like the horse. I don't want to talk. While I had my friend Sam to help tend lines, for the majority of the time, my brother Liam had to do it solo. He had developed a technique where he could control both his bow and stern line from his cockpit winches, allowing him to either sheet in or ease out depending on the needs. Bringing a 37 foot long keel deep drafted boat solo through the canal is a daunting prospect and I have to commend him for how easy he made it look. Well good morning folks, after a bit of a lazy start We are now sailing down Loch Ness. And we've got the wind behind us, so we're goose-winging all the way. We had a little bit of a lead on Liam, but he has finally hunted us down and passed us. But we tried a bit of everything, we've had the spinnaker up, but with my cruising chute you just can't really sail it dead-down wind, so it didn't want to work for me. But it looks like his sail's just back, but he's busy filming. So we're passing him. But yeah, cracking sail today. Like this is, this is the good stuff right now. Yeah, lock sailing is pretty good. I'm a happy chappy this morning. A brief update, but we have clawed back on Liam. Clawed back. So life is good. We got all our sails. But if I'm being truthful, the only reason we've crawled back on him is because he's put away his head sail. So he's trying to embarrass us, I think. And it's working. Well, good morning folks. We are just heading towards Murtagh flight, is it? Murtagh, Murtagh, we're not sure. Murtagh flight we'll go with. Um... And then that should, in theory, be the last big set of locks that we go through. I think maybe there's one or perhaps two more little locks to head out to sea. I'll be honest, I'm quite looking forward to not having to go through a lock again, but yeah, we shall see. Till the way back exactly. But yeah, quite a pretty little spot we're in. Lots of wildflowers along the bank. We've got a couple of boats behind us and Liam decided he was sick of waiting for us so he pushed his way past. Rarer thing though, Liam being ahead. It's important to know. It is a rare thing, yeah. Heading down the Murtagh flight of four locks towards the Seaport Marina was our final challenge of the Caledonian Canal. This was the busiest lock we had encountered with seven boats including our own all transiting at the same time. The majority of boats like us were heading to the seaport marina to bunker down before Scotland was engulfed by storm Flores the following day. For transiting this set of locks we reprised our multi-hull again, securing so far against Leaving myself and Sam ashore to tend lines while Liam steered both boats. Although I wasn't a fan of leaving my boat unattended this was the easiest way for us to transit two long keel boats through a large set of locks. After spending a few days in Seaport Marina allowing the storm to pass it was time for us to begin our journey towards Norway. Good morning folks, how are we doing today? Come on give us the give us the spiel give us the daily update. Okay so today's activities plan is to depart to Wick, we've actually already departed. From just over there, we minced around a bit and we've arrived again just here, which is still in Inverness. We haven't really passed anywhere as of yet, but the plan is to go out there, see where the weather is really, really nice, where there's no rain, it doesn't look damp at all, go out there, sail down the coast to Wick, 70 miles. Should take us until just after midnight this evening. It's good, right? Very good. Will we pass any nice bridges on the way? I think we will. I'm pretty sure we'll go under that big road bridge coming into Inverness. Cracking bridge, I've heard. Yeah. So alongside us, we have... Oh God, it's raining. Not a fan. I think since being bald, I've really started hating the rain. It makes my head cold. But yeah, we have a Saltram 40 and a Saltram 36. So quite... Considerably bigger for just four foot of waterline length. Well, length overall, sorry, actually. Actually. But yeah, it's just... I wouldn't say the mast was actually that much taller, given that it's, what, like a metre taller? Yeah, okay, I'm gonna go hide inside, because I'm not a fan of this. We are just in our very final lock. About to leave the canal system. So it's, yeah, it's been really good. It's been a good time. Heading out to sea now, so... I think it's roughly about a 70 mile passage, so yeah, just hoping for favourable weather. But we'll see what we get. We've got patches of blue sky, so it's not too bad. I'm going to hand over to Cassandre if he wants to give us some facts about this nice bridge. It's a nice bridge. It's a road bridge. Looks quite high. I think higher than our air draft of 14-15 metres. We hope so. We certainly hope so. I mean, if we look... This is... Ah, look at that. Look at all that traffic. Nice bridge. We have Liam behind us. As usual, always behind us, always slowing off the show. And yeah, way out there. See? Better turn these things off. Well, good afternoon folks. We are absolutely flying long. Yeah, we're sort of having a bit of a downwind race with Liam over in the distance. You see Sapar's hauling ass. Probably pushing it a little bit more than I normally would. We've kind of got Sort of high 20s gusting over 30 knots at the moment. We are on a double reef main, a reefed yankee, a staysail and sadly you can see we are down one spinnaker pole in the high gusts. It just completely crumpled so we've got our second one up now. So we are finally underway and we are sailing which is absolutely wonderful. We got through the canal no problem and we left the seaport marina earlier on today around about 11 and now we're actually underway and sailing and it's a bit breezy at times. We've had gusts over 30 knots and Aya and Safar are both cracking on really well. We've had a little bit of all sorts, we just, the wind kept building so we had to keep putting more and more reefs in the sail. Right now we've got quite a heavily reefed Genoa and two reefs in the main but she's comfortable and the other thing is it's quite flat too because the wind is blowing off the land so the sea slowly but surely is starting to build now As we are putting a better distance between us. and the land but uh here we are the uh the grand plan is to um is to get to Wick today which is here and uh and we should be getting in there currently according to this around about i reckon it's realistically it's probably going to be around about half 10 ish before we're before we're going to be in Wick i would have thought um but that's good we're actually underway and heading One of the hurdles was to try and organize getting insurance, but anyway it seems like it's been accomplished. So thanks very much for M&N Boats for helping with that. It was a good push at the end there to try and get that insurance quote through very quickly. It turned out my current provider wouldn't cover me to make the crossing and then it looked like it was going to be dubious if they would cover that as sailing In the Norwegian waters, well anything above sort of Stavanger and that's very south Norway and we were hoping to get a bit more north than that. But anyway it looks like we've got it now so that's good. So that's us, wind is back up again 29 knots, keeps hitting 30 occasionally. Speed 8.7 so that's quite a lot. Morgan's obviously pushing quite hard because I can see he's got his full genoa up. He's got two reefs in the main. Right now this is our configuration. Keeps it all low. And quite a heavily, quite a heavily swell in our, quite nicely. With the conditions continuing to deteriorate and the swell building, I decided to put recording aside for the time being and concentrate on hand steering and delivering my boat to the port of Wick without any further damage. Coming up in the next episode, we depart Wick and take both boats across the North Sea, in mixed conditions. I hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please don't forget to like, comment and subscribe, and I'll see you in the next one.