Hanging with the seals at Loch Scavaig

It’s been a long and difficult day of sailing in extremely rough conditions. As we continue north late in the day, I suggest to Graham that perhaps we should just take up anchorage in one of the many uninhabited bays we pass.

He looks at me as if I were a madman. “Only a fool would spend the night where it is so peopled by ghosts,” he says.

This has something to do with The Highland Clearances in Scotland (which are always capitalized, just like Ireland’s Great Famine and our own Great Depression). The Clearances, in which the British forced the displacements of the population in the Scottish Highland to the Lowlands and brutal coastal areas along the Inner Hebrides, took place 200 years ago, but everyone in Scotland is still a bit tetchy about it, so while I’d like to tell Graham to bugger the damn ghosts, I keep my mouth shut.

We coninue on, finally puttering in to Loch Scavaig, on the southern end of Skye. It’s a peaceful, beautiful bay, ringed by rugged hills painted an emerald green. A great number of seals inhabit the Loch, some sunning themselves on the rocks, others popping up unexpectedly around Chantilly, doing a bit of surveillance on us.

Though it’s almost 7 o’clock, there’s still plenty of night left in the sky so a small group decides to take the tender and head to shore to hike the Cuillen Hills to Loch Coruisk. Graham, Topi, and I stay behind and enjoy a glass of wine and some kibble. It is so beautiful out that none of us talk. We just sit quietly with our drinks, smiling at the seals who come to visit alongside the boat.

I am in heaven. And wish we could stay here for days.