I knew that Elizabeth Baker was going to write ‘Mayfly Round Mull’, and I looked forward to reading about her cruise around a favourite island. In particular, I wondered whether she had explored Loch Spelve on the east coast in the Firth of Lorne, which I have always considered an ideal place for dinghies.

I write this after enjoying the first part of Elizabeth’s article in the spring Bulletin, even though I found that she omitted the loch as she still had three hours of favourable tide and plenty of daylight left when she reached its entrance on the way south. On the face of it, Spelve is only one of three lochs in the vicinity, the others being Loch Don to the north and Loch Buie, where Black Swan eventually anchored, to the south. However, imagine a stretch of inland sea the size of Coniston Water — in fact, much wider at the point of its T‑junction with the Firth of Lorne — which does have the feel of a large lake when you lose quickly the sight of the open sea after negotiating the narrow entrance. A good reason for drawing your attention to it is that most authorities neglect it, regarding it merely as a convenient bolt-hole in a westerly blow. Admiralty Chart 2171 depicts the entrance only; the interior is blank. The normally excellent Clyde Cruising Club’s Sailing Directions, in this case the volume Kintyre to Ardnamurchan, has a sketch of the entrance and three or four short but valuable paragraphs, but the bottom half of page 50, where the eye expects to see a neat little chart of the full loch, is left empty.

Which brings me to the sketch-map accompanying this article: it is a tidied-up version of the one I have drawn in my copy of the CCC Pilot and should give aspiring navigators an idea of what to expect. It is the right size for sticking into that offending space on page 50 — but photocopy it rather than do violence to your Bulletin! You do not have a copy of the Sailing Directions? If you intend to sail the West Coast you really should have, and browsing over them in the winter months helps to keep your enthusiasm alive The CCC Sailing Directions are now produced in A4 format with separate volumes for different areas, although the original single-volume, dark blue tome is still available, complete with archaic spelling; I bought mine in 1984. My Scots cruising friends tend to refer to this earlier volume as the ‘Authorised Version’ as opposed to the ‘New English Bible’, the later edition which has superseded it. Not a bad analogy. The following paragraphs will serve, I hope, as pilotage notes to go with the map.

Loch Spelve entrance is practically invisible until you are right on it. I have entered and left it in perfect weather, marvelling at the way it blends in with the many surrounding hills; the gentle curve of the entrance from NW to W helps the illusion. Local magnetic anomalies play their part also, so even on the best of days it is best not to neglect dead reckoning, unless you are feeling your way along the coast, close in. It must have been a perfect hideout in the bad old days. If Robert Louis Stevenson had known it as well as he did the island of Erraid down the coast and around the Ross of Mull, it also would have been featured in his romantic fiction.

Every beautiful refuge should have a guardian at the gate. In the case of Loch Spelve it is a submerged rock over 100 metres off the north shore halfway along the entrance. It is supposed to be part of a drying patch, but I have never seen it be so helpful as to appear. Alone, this would not be a problem, but a wide spit reaches out towards it from the south shore at this point, squeezing the channel down to 50 metres at LWS. I have taken boats of up to 7 feet draught through here, so it is not a kind of Scottish ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, and shallow dinghies find it relatively unexciting, but it pays to get the line right whatever the craft, as the tidal stream is reputed to run at 3½ knots in the narrows at springs, if you are careless enough to time your entrance or exit badly.

When entering, keep to the middle, ignoring the bay to starboard and the shoals which extend from it, but then aim to close the north shore where the second point in marks the western arm of the bay. There is a conspicuously dark shoulder above this point which identifies it clearly. Continue parallel with the shore until its line can be seen to change direction; more westerly than north-westerly. The drying patch is about a cable further on from this corner. Pass it almost in midstream: the Croggan pier is a good mark to aim for at this point, if it is identified quickly. There is a plethora of paint marks on the rocks ashore which do little except point to the position of the drying rock. (The CCC pilot suggests the rock may be somewhat to the east of these marks). The white paint on other rocks and cairns, some on the hillside, can be used as leading marks, but a newcomer running in with the tide could be standing into danger before it was all sorted out. After these cairns have been positively identified they have also been known to stand up, baa and move off. One sailor of my acquaintance swears he heard them chuckle as they did it. Once past the constriction, the entrance opens up very quickly into the broad sheet of water, almost two miles wide, which is the middle section of the loch. The entrance proper is exactly one mile long.

When leaving Loch Spelve it is best at first to do nothing except move in fairly close to the first bulge in the northern shoreline, as this obscures your view of the narrows until you are abreast of it anyway (unless you are too far south of the line). When you are level with it, identify our old friend, the dark shoulder, which is above the west (inner) arm of the most seawardly bay on the north shore. Behind and above it a vertical cliff stands over the last point on the north shoreline. These two in line give a transit on the drying patch, so leave with the cliff in the background just open (i.e. to starboard) of the dark shoulder — too open and you will stray onto the Croggan spit, which is marked at its widest part by a shingle patch on the high water line. I have indicated these features on the chart by s (for ‘shoulder’) and vc (for ‘vertical cliff’). Obviously they can also be used as back markers to check your entrance line as well as your exit, but less easily.

It could be that the interior of Loch Spelve is ignored because there are no hidden dangers once you are inside it. However, there are some features which would be better charted; Sgeir na Faoilinn and the foul ground by it, for instance, cannot be seen on entering as it is two miles away. Perhaps it would be for the best if Spelve remained unadvertised. The Mull hinterland is a true wilderness and will remain so as long as its small roads merely skirt the central massif. The loch gives you a taste of this. The roads are largely invisible from the sea. I have mapped the homesteads which are sufficiently conspicuous above the tree line to help judge progress. The hills crowd round. The summit of Creach Beinn, over 2,000 feet high, is only 1½ horizontal miles from my favourite anchorage near the mouth of Faoilinn Glaise burn. In bad weather there are squalls from the peaks, but no worse than you get from Coniston Old Man, to return to an earlier comparison. If you wish to avoid them, anchor by Ardura, but not in strong westerlies. The northeast bay is another ‘customary’ anchorage, but avoid fishing boats and a rock in the centre of the head of the bay.

The spot by the burn near Kinlochspelve (see chart) is well suited to dinghy cruisers. The bottom is hard-packed mud or clay which shelves gradually. A little weed has gained a foothold, but it is an ideal place to take the ground and dry out. The bottom gives excellent holding if you anchor off — once the anchor bites. I recall five attempts to sink a 25 lb CQR into it once. After it held, it kept us safe all night in f6-8, but needed little effort to raise in the morning. Running a line ashore is quite feasible here. The road is close to the shoreline; in fact you anchor at the point where they start to diverge. Between them is a thick growth of bracken in which to hide the tender and paddles. From here you can walk the road past Loch Uisg and on to Loch Buie, one of the most lovely you are likely to walk. At times it seems closer to cliché than reality, as you meet with Highland cattle knee-deep in grassy woodland glades, or view the monument at the roadside which testifies to the loyalty of a past clan chief to Queen Victoria, and then move out into more open country, with brooding hills all around the glen running down to Lochbuie. A greater challenge would be to climb Creach Beinn, a 700 metre peak with no footpaths shown on the map!

There are undoubtedly other very congenial anchorages around the loch. In particular, I have not explored fully the N and NE shores yet. An eye has to be kept open for old fish farming sites with decaying staging and equipment; this area is perfect for the industry, although the big one at Balure is probably the only one currently in business. From near the entrance it looks like three submarines moored together, which, in actuality, is not an uncommon sight in Scottish waters. The mooring buoys off Balure are obviously for working boats only. It is as well to remember that nothing except water can be replenished here. The only other amenity is the telephone ¼ mile east of Croggan. Craignure is a very long walk north from the head of the loch, and Loch Buie, with its ‘Post Office’ is 4 miles south from its foot. No supplies, no amenities, no pub — what more could you want?

Loch Don is just over three miles north of Spelve, and the contrast between them could not be greater. Don is more of a silted-up river estuary than a loch, and practically all of it dries at LWS. The channel twists and turns between rocks, shoals and banks, and in fact no fewer than eight burns run into it at different places. English East Coast mudlark members of the DCA please note — I understand you like this kind of thing! I would like to quest up it on a rising tide to see if it is possible to reach Lochdon village after negotiating the reefs at Leideig. In fact, this area has a lot of potential for a DCA ‘cruise in company’. Leaving from Dunstaffnage Bay (Oban is very crowded and commercialised these days) the course would be set to by-pass Oban and track down Kerrera Sound, which offers one or two good bays for a lunch stop. At the southern tip of Kerrera (Rubha Seanach) a course might be laid for Spelve, in which a day or two could be spent profitably before heading further north to Loch Don. Those who had no time to spare would head back to Dunstaffnage and home, while others could overnight in Ardtornish Bay or Loch Aline before sailing up the Sound of Mull to explore Loch Teacuis and the renowned fifteen miles long Loch Sunart. Very tasty! Perhaps next year… I’ve earmarked summer ‘89 for the Outer Hebrides if the weather serves.

Rounding the Ross of Mull is a serious proposition. The approach from the Firth of Lorne seems to go on for ever; there are nasty little reefs which break surface here and there; there is plenty of tidal turbulence, especially in the mouth of the Sound of lona. Elizabeth Baker and John Quantrell did splendidly in taking Black Swan through this area so smoothly. Elizabeth’s joke about ending up in the wrong bay, duly christened ‘Not Not Ardalanish’ has an added dimension, as the Clyde Cruising Club cartographer made her mistake in reverse, as the pilot book shows. Black Swan’s objective was a bay generally called Rubh Ardalanish after the point of that name which forms the eastern arm. Her actual landfall can only have been Port nan Ròn, two miles to the west and very similar in shape. In the CCC pilot, Rubh Ardalanish Bay is misnamed Port nan Ròn, an error which they have since rectified in their corrections by requesting users to delete the name. A further quirk is that Port nan Ròn means ‘Bay of the Seal’: I presume this is the eponymous seal which inspected Black Swan. This can be a confusing area, and many of us have been rescued from disorientation by noticing the cathedral on Iona, perhaps just in time. One reason for confusion is that the island of Erraid, about a square mile in area, is so obviously an island on the chart but in reality seems to be mainland Mull. I find it an intensely interesting place, but probably only because of its historical connections.

It was in 1870 on Erraid (pronounced ‘Erid’) that Robert Louis Stevenson, aged 19, finally made up his mind to become a writer. He told his father, who advised him to give up his engineering studies and become a lawyer, so that he would have a safe profession to fall back on, as Sir Walter Scott, among others, had done before him. This was not the first time RLS had been here. His father and uncle, the two brothers Thomas and David Stevenson respectively, were joint engineers for the Northern Lighthouse Board, and his father was in charge on Erraid, supervising the building of the Dubh Artach light, an outlying guardian of the Torran Rocks. The operation began in 1867 when a base was established for ferrying men and materials out to the rock whenever the weather permitted. From an observatory on Erraid, now a rusting hulk, signals could be made to Dubh Artach. Parts of the structure, and the iron barracks used on the rock for the shelter and protection of the workers, were pre-fabricated on Erraid, and the granite used was quarried here; all taken by steamer the 14 miles to Dubh Artach.

It is probably true to say that this lighthouse was the Stevenson brothers’ greatest achievement: a tough, elegant structure built on an isolated plug of basalt which rises 35 feet from the sea. It was completely finished in 1872, after five years of heroic struggle with the elements. The base on Erraid cost £10,300 and the lighthouse £65,784. I leave you to translate that into 1989 terms! RLS was immensely proud of his family’s achievements. He once wrote, ‘When the lights come out at sundown along the shores of Scotland, they burn more brightly for the genius of my father,’ and he claimed that the Stevensons had built to themselves more substantial monuments than those of the Egyptian pharaohs! But in 1870 civil engineering was very far from his mind as he swam in the sea, sunbathed, and taught himself how to sail a small boat.

Key to abbreviations

(reading from the top)

AC An Caolas (‘The Strait’) p pier Obs. observatory mr mooring rings (in rocks by Tinker’s Hole) T Tinker’s Hole O B Otter Bay D B B ‘David Balfour’s Bay’ or ‘Balfour Bay’, properly Traigh Gheal

The most important thing he did was to make up his mind to plunge into the cold waters of professional authorship — perhaps we have a lot to thank Erraid for. Those who wish to find the island in his writings do not have far to look. It appears as ‘Eilean Aros’ in the Charles Darnaway story The Merry Men; but by far the most famous appearance is in Kidnapped, when the abducted David Balfour escapes from the brig Covenant only by shipwreck on the Torran Rocks (without a lighthouse at that time!) and is washed up in a sandy bay, Tràigh Gheal, afterwards to be known as ‘David Balfour’s Bay’, of course! Some writers have suggested that the brig must have been wrecked on the Rankin Rocks, conveniently SW of the bay, in RLS’s imagination, but in fact those who know the book well will remember the epigraph where the author apologises in advance to a knowledgeable friend for having abused his artistic licence in bringing the Torran Rocks much closer to Mull to suit the plot. For my money they can stay where they are.

In 1870 there were 180 people on Erraid. This number dwindled rapidly as only the lighthouse keepers’ families needed to live there in the nine semi-detached, grey-granite cottages built in 1868-9 by the NLB. The lighthouse was mechanised in the 1940s and by the 1960s the island was depopulated. In the 70s it was bought for £90,000 by a Dutchman who only wished to use it as a summer place! He has allowed the cottages and fields to be taken over by a commune, the ‘spiritual community of Findhorn’, who have breathed life back into the place, tending crops and repairing buildings. The island’s most beautiful anchorage, Tinker’s Hole, is sadly overpopulated by yachts in summertime, no doubt all of them, ironically enough, seeking solitude and peace. This need not deter the dinghy cruiser, who will easily find seclusion among the skerries N-NW of Eilean Dubh, or by drying out between Erraid and Mull — it is only a tidal island, something which did not damage its reputation with RLS. He thought it ‘marvellous-handy for home’! Balfour’s Bay is perhaps too open to the SW to stay overnight and preserve peace of mind. (See chartlet).

Robert Louis Stevenson deserves a high place in the canon of patron saints of those who love boats and islands. His first and most famous novel connects his name with both for ever. I never see Erraid but I reflect that the man who loved islands all of his life loved this one the best. (‘My isle. I call it mine after the use of lovers’). That he also learned to sail here and made up his mind to write is a happy bonus.

For those who wish to sample Mull at its very best on the western side, I would recommend Loch na Làthaich and Bunessan as a safe base from which to venture out to Staffa and the Treshnish Isles, and also to lona, Ulva, Loch Scridain and Loch Beg. The recommended anchorage for yachts is behind Eilean Bàn (see chartlet) but I have dragged anchor here twice because of weed. An idyllic place for dinghies is inside Loch Caol (pronounced ‘Cool’) as a shallow sill at the entrance precludes keel boats. Not as much of the loch dries out as the maps would have you believe. Once inside you have perfect peace, as the shoreline rises abruptly in small wooded hills. There is a private house at the head of the loch, Ardfenaig, and I am not sure that there is easy access to the road anywhere else. I have made my way from its south shore only with difficulty to Bendoran, so I feel the best plan is to slip your cable and go shopping by boat if you are there for any length of time. The high point above the south side of the mouth of the bay offers a superlative view of the whole area. The boatyard at Bendoran has a handy pontoon which has 2 metres of water for four hours either side of HW, so dinghies have no problem at any time. As well as the usual chandlery, gas, fuel and charts, the yard supplies goats’ milk, home-baked bread and hot showers. The village offers a shop, PO and hotels. From the window of one of these I saw the most colourful sunset ever — a study in shocking pink! It presaged the mother and father of all gales. Do not take your boat all the way to the village as the beach is much encumbered with stones, mud and weed, except at HWS. The pier is used often by fishing craft, including scampi and lobster boats which dodge in and out at any time. I would not wish to obstruct them by leaving an unattended boat there. Land somewhere between the pier and village bay and walk around. If you are stormbound or at a loose end, there are worse places on Mull to be than Bunessan. At least you are on the road, so you can catch a bus to Fionnphort and lona, or walk down to the south coast. There is always the pub… I have a fondness for it because it was the starting point for my best day’s sail ever: from Bunessan to land on Staffa, thence to Lunga in the Treshnish (lunch) and finally Loch Eatharna, Coll. Beautiful weather, and my first time at all those places. All-in-all, an excellent forward base for exploring W Mull. Good sailing!