About this website

This was originally supposed to be a book, my last remaining ambition being to appear at the Edinburgh Book Festival. But that was because when I had the idea it was so long ago that the Internet hardly existed, and certainly Internet access from the West Coast was nothing like as good as it is today (who had heard of iphones and dongles in the last century?).

I suppose it must have been in the mid 1990s that I realised there was a gap in the information for sailors on the West Coast of Scotland, and indeed in many other places as well. The admirable Clyde Cruising Club Sailing Directions, and the Martin Lawrence Sailing Directions, tell you how to get to the anchorages, where the rocks are, where to anchor and so on. The tourist and travel books are all well and good, but tend to miss out the places you can only get to by boat, and anyway so many are written largely for people in cars. The reference books are mostly too bulky to keep on board. In short, there was and amazingly still is, a gap in the middle - what to see and do when you get to an anchorage (not just lounge about on board drinking and eating without even bothering to inflate the tender). Of course you can load yourself up with various books which are listed under useful books, but they take up space, some you wouldn't want to get wet , and anyway there would be too much searching about to do. And crucially these days, the Internet provides connectivity to a whole host of useful and useful websites. So here we are, a website to plug the gap, at least from Kintyre to around the Small Isles.

What are my credentials for this self-imposed task? Well I was a neurologist all my professional life but that did include a lot of writing (of books and papers) and editing (of a scientific journal for 10 years). And I have sailed in the area since the 1960s when my father chartered an old wooden boat on the Clyde, then at least annually from 1974 when I chartered, and in my own boat from 1988 when I moved from Oxford to Edinburgh for reasons which were not entirely unconnected with sailing in what is undoubtedly the best cruising area in the British Isles, probably in Europe, and maybe in the whole world. It is indeed odd how sometimes sitting aboard Calypso, our Contessa 32, I catch myself imagining there is a time difference between the West Coast of Scotland and the rest of the country, so much so that I may wonder what the time is at home in Edinburgh. This must be to do with the other worldness of the West Coast, or maybe because to me it has so often been associated with holidays in distant Scotland when I lived in land locked Oxford. A weekend on the boat still feels like a holiday. Amazingly much of what I am going to describe is physically connected to England by road and rail, you could walk it from London if you had the time.


Getting around this website

Acknowledgements





Scottish anchorages

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