Eighteen Feet Wide, Twenty Allowed: Our Crinan Canal Ordeal

You know when you're watching a really good show together on Netflix, and your significant other sneakily watches a few episodes without you, so when you sit down for the next one you've completely lost the plot and feel personally betrayed? Well, dear reader, that's exactly where we are with my travel stories.

What do you mean? I hear you ask, possibly worried I have, understandably by now, abandoned the boat, Ken, and the dog for an emergency spa sabbatical in some five star Scottish castle, being drip-fed vats of vintage wine and spoon-fed local delicacies (no haggis please) by a burly man named Bruce in a blushingly short kilt….sigh... Fear not. This has not happened.

What I actually mean is that we have left Scotland, and I have almost not written a single word about our time there. Not because nothing happened - oh, no! There were story worthy smatterings of f*cktastrophes everywhere that come standard with boat life. No, indeed the delay is thanks to a series of time-devouring dramas: one being extreme food poisoning to yours truly while attempting to navigate the Caledonian Canal (a complete disaster in its own right), and - most improbably - my real estate career, the one I thought I'd waved bon voyage to when I left Florida, clawing its way back from the grave with deals I can't quite bring myself to turn down. Not just because the money pays for a few more pints of diesel, but because the characters attached to these multimillion-dollar deals are so magnificently unhinged they're basically research for the book I'll one day write about my time in professionally simpering service to the wealthy, the unfiltered and the deranged.

So now I'm faced with a choice: I could pretend the whole Scotland thing never happened and risk you all getting tired of me. Or you and I could hunker down for a painstaking, blow-by-blow historical recounting, which I will get precisely halfway through, spot something shiny, and abandon completely - which you wouldn’t notice because you would have fallen into a deep coma. Or, I could flick through my camera roll and pluck out the highlights.

Clearly, if you're reading this, I went with option three.

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I mentioned our first port of call, the Mull of Galloway, in my last essay, and the successful launching of “Moonlight” our new (second) dinghy, so let's skip along to stop two: Loch Ryan and Stranraer, tucked along something charmingly named The Rhins of Galloway. Reader, I regret to inform you we saw no Rhins. What we did see, as we sped down our first loch toward Stranraer, were wing and sail foilers; literally hundreds of them, whizzing about like caffeinated dragonflies. Confused, we soldiered on, until a safety boat sped toward us and not so politely informed us that we were about to plow right through the Scottish National Wingfoiling Championships.

Oops!

It was also somewhere around this moment that I sadly accepted a harsh truth: "summer" in Scotland was going to mean alpine thermal ski gear, indefinitely. The very idea of voluntarily entering that water, on a foilboard for “pleasure” struck me as an unbelievable spectacle in itself - right up there with mowing through the middle of these hardy aquatic athletes. We quickly diverted and did the anchor of shame off to the side. Stranraer itself wasn't much to write home about, and frankly, we didn't need anyone recognizing us as the Americans who'd nearly torpedoed the national championships, so we didn't linger long. 

From Loch Ryan we entered the Firth of Clyde, and this is where the postcard stuff finally starts. Whole books have been written about cruising the Firth of Clyde. We, the numskulls that we are, had budgeted roughly a week. Not really our fault considering crossing the Atlantic safely kinda took priority. But the moment we saw the heather-coated mountains dramatically plunging into that deep, dark water, with possibly bagpipes playing in the background, we knew we'd perhaps made a scheduling error, and would have to come back to do it service. Regardless of how much we try to be the hippies of the sea, and have a laissez faire attitude to our itinerary, we are goal oriented beings, and think given the time, we did OK: 

Our first stop was the Isle of Arran — and a quick vocabulary note for the class: there are no islands in Scotland. They are all isles. There are, in fact, a great many new words to learn touring Scotland, largely because a fair number of Scots don't appear to speak English at all. It is genuinely difficult, at times, to determine whether you're hearing Gaelic or simply a very committed accent. A Firth, for example is the Scottish word for an inlet, a Kyle is a channel, and a Strath is a wide river valley that is wider than a Glen, but not as wide as a Carse. I think this is why the Scottish invented whisky, once you have shared several drams with a Scotsman, you are basically talking the same language. (PS. Never call it Scotch or spell it “whiskey” or you will not ever be offered the good stuff).

Arran itself was incredible. We anchored in Brodick Bay and explored the town of Brodick, which offers a genuinely spectacular hike past a castle and up a mountain suitably called Goatfell. It felt very Lord of the Rings, which makes us hobbits because, after an hour of walking, during which we had not yet reached the actual base of the mountain, we blamed the dog and turned around. I'm sure the view from the summit is breathtaking. That's exactly why I own a drone.

My daughter Elsa made the fatal error of mentioning she had the week off work from her London pub job, so I put her on a train, then a plane, then a ferry, until she washed up beside us on Arran. I have my suspicions that she treks to these remote corners of the earth more for the dog than for us, but at this point, I'll take a visit no matter the reason.

So, armed with a new victim - I mean, crew member - we navigated northwards up Loch Fyne to a place called Ardrishaig, the staging area to enter the Crinan Canal. The Crinan Canal is one of those hallowed maritime experiences sailors speak of in hushed tones as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Of course I don’t really count myself as a sailor…I merely drifted up next to a particularly sexy bloke who wanted to do this, and now here I am. I eyed the canal with suspicion. 

The Crinan Canal was built as a shortcut to spare sailors the notoriously tricky waters around the Mull of Kintyre - which is strange since clearly Paul McCartney never had a problem with it. This nine-mile stretch of man made aquatic thoroughfare once shuttled 27,000 sheep and 2,000 cattle through its locks (according to Google. I don’t know how Google stayed awake counting all those sheep). I’m also not sure how you put a cow on a boat, but since even I can now hop on and off our new dinghy like a veritable gazelle, it just shows anything is possible. Today the canal mostly ferries salty seadogs eager to add another hallowed stamp to their crusty logbooks.

And of course, despite not having a clue why I was here, and what I was meant to be doing, we were no exception. The maximum boat beam allowed through the Crinan is twenty feet. Moonfleet is eighteen feet wide. What could possibly go wrong?

All I can say is thank goodness we had a spare pair of hands. In some of these locks, three hundred thousand litres of water come gushing in at once, and the boat rises fast — fast enough that the fenders we'd so carefully positioned suddenly needed repositioning, all over again, all around the boat. Meanwhile, several people have to be hanging or dangling or whatever they can manage, onto the bow and stern lines at all times, while the water gushes and the boat rocks. You can’t tie these lines because if those lines are tied too tight while the boat is rising, the boaty will not stay floaty.

…I have no idea how those salty seadogs consider this a relaxing pastime. Between barely squeezing into some of these locks and being genuinely terrified that some part of the boat was about to be shaved off and left down the lock walls, what is meant to be a bucket-list moment turned into an outright traumatic fiasco. At least it was for me….Captain Silver Fox loved every minute of it. Did I mention that he loves f*ktastrophes?

I must say, the canal walks were fantastic, and the lock staff were incredibly friendly and helpful. After a few days we got the hang of this lock business just in time to reach the end and the town of Crinan. Crinan is a very small village with a wee basin at the North end of the canal,  and given that we were the biggest boat that could possibly squeeze through the entire canal, we popped out the other side into something approaching a celebrity welcome. We celebrated with (several) feasts at the delightful Crinan Hotel.

Unfortunately, it was time for Elsa to leave us. We found a helpful lock keeper willing to run her to the bus station, where a two-hour bus ride would deliver her safely back to Glasgow airport. Unfortunately, "safely" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because the bus dropped her in the middle of nowhere, on a busy roundabout, a solid ten miles from the airport. She dragged her suitcase to the nearest car showroom and, in tears, begged the staff to help her find a way to the airport. Eventually, someone called her a taxi. She is, I suspect, scarred for life, and it may now take considerably more than the dog to lure her back to visit us in one of our remote “fun” locations again.

Okay, now I have at least a part of our Scottish trip down on “paper” I realise that perhaps the reason why I took so long to place finger nubs on keys was because most of my Scottish experiences swung wildly between hysterical laugher and silent shock…and the worst/best of my tale is yet to come...

Next up: our passage further north through the Caledonian Canal whilst suffering from food poisoning under the watchful eye of Ben Nevis (who was no help at all). The most perfect anchorage we have ever experienced in Loch Ness, a whisky adventure and the industrial park we had to call home for a week. 

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