A long promised reunion with an old friend who lives on the Isle of Skye brought Helen and I and our boats Baggywrinkle and Bridget to the distant northern waters of the Minch for our summer holiday in 1994. Baggywrinkle is only a twelve foot Tideway and is a little small for two people to sleep aboard for more than a couple of consecutive nights, so as usual in our longer holidays the idea was to have a base on shore and mix relaxing daysails to nearby places of interest with a few longer cruises sleeping on board. The seven-and-a-half foot Bridget is a 'Barrowboat Sailor' dinghy with an improved lugsail, and acts as Baggywrinkle's tender.

Skye is a huge island with a deeply indented coastline that promised interesting sailing. Our friend lives on the northern coastline of the island, so we looked for somewhere convenient around the nearby shores of Loch Snizort and Loch Dunvegan where we could launch our boats. The place was not exactly heaving with slipways, and from a very limited number of options we chose Stein on Loch Bay as a base because it has a nice slipway that can be used free of charge and at all states of the tide except dead low water, four of those handy blue HIDB moorings that have been laid all over the Western Isles for visiting yachtsmen, (three had been appropriated by local fishing boats but there happened to be one still free), and most importantly a splendid seafood restaurant and cafe, just by the slipway. The only other option was an ugly concrete slipway at Dunvegan owned by Lord MacLeod that has a gradient to tax Chris Bonnington.

They say it rains all the time in Scotland and that the midges bite especially badly in summer, but for those first few days the sun glinted on Baggywrinkle's varnish as she swung at her mooring, no drizzle obscured the majestic Outer Hebrides on the horizon and the midges were absent. The lack of midges could presumably be explained by the stiff breeze that blew Fives and more, and struck viciously down from the heights around the Loch, sending ominous dark patches dashing to and fro across its waters. So any ambitious plans for coastal cruises were shelved for the time being. We explored on foot, ate in the restaurant and pottered around in Bridget when the evening brought lesser winds.

On our first proper days sailing from Loch Bay we went out in Baggywrinkle to explore the handy screen of islands that shelters the Loch from north-westerlies. Isay, the largest island, is a mile long and was at one time inhabited - from its shore a poignant row of roofless black houses look out over the sheltered sound between Isay and the smaller island of Mingay. When did people abandon Isay and in what circumstances? We found no one on Skye who could tell us - but eviction and emigration has been a brutal constant in the history of the outlying islands of these western shores for over two hundred years, and the ruins of lost communities haunt too many lonely glens and remote loch sides for human memory to recall the stories of the people who once lived there. We sat beside one of the empty houses and watched the seals and the seabirds while we ate our lunch in the sun. Baggywrinkle, just lifting afloat on the flooding tide, lay happily to her anchor in one of the boat landings. The people of so many old coastal communities may have long departed, and the fields they toiled in for so long run to bracken and ling, but the narrow strips of beach they laboriously cleared of rocks still provide useful stopping places for a dinghy cruiser in these latter days.

In the afternoon we reached down into Loch Dunvegan, dominated by the brooding castle of the MacLeod of MacLeod. At the mouth of the Loch is the small rocky island of Lambay; the sound between it and the eastern shore is very shallow but carpeted in a fine coral sand that is clearly visible through the clear water as it slips past eerily just under your keel. The coral sand continues in a series of beaches along the shore of the loch, that are much frequented by keenly paddling herds of hairy black cattle and the odd spade-carrying human child.

The next day gales were forecast for our waters and so we explored in the car. But the gales did not come until the evening and so we were bitter of a good sailing day wasted. We bought some cheap 7 x 50 binoculars in Portree and saw an otter, so perhaps all was not lost.

Skye is a strange island. The legal right of tenure that crofters still enjoy was instituted following a series of riots on Skye in the nineteenth century, so crofting is a major land use. Crofts spatter the island and house a large indigenous Gaelic-speaking population. But these days the croft houses are mostly modem prefab bungalows and not very scenic, and many of them have been bought up by English incomers or settled by the bohemian aficionados of the New Age. We were told that the only sure place to meet real Gaels is to go to Tesco's in Portree, so we did and there they were - but everywhere else, everyone you meet is either English or a New-Ager. The English seem to run all the hotels, the shops and the B&Bs, and the New-Agers fill up all the spaces in between. The scenery on Skye can be very spectacular, but the social mix imparts a peculiarly inauthentic character to the island.

The next day the gale was with us with a vengeance. We resigned ourselves to another day's exploration on land, but went over to Stein first to check how Baggywrinkle was doing on her mooring. The wind was from the south east, so it was off the land, but Loch Bay is long enough for a hefty fetch to build up at the moorings off Stein if the wind is from that quarter, and Baggywrinkle was snatching viciously at her mooring, water breaking clean over her bow as she pitched into the seas. It was silly really to have gone to look at her, as there was nothing we could do to help her; the conditions were far too bad to go out to her in little Bridget. We went for a walk along the shores of a different loch so we could not see her. It was no good. We did not enjoy ourselves. The wind strengthened, a mist came down and soon it began to rain. By the mid-afternoon we called it a day and went back to Loch Bay. There is little cafe in the straggling settlement called Lusta, high above the Loch, that enjoys a panoramic view of its waters. The patron thoughtfully provides binoculars by its picture windows so worried boat owners can keep an eye on their vessels far below. Being on Skye the cafe is of course run by a Geordie. He asked us which was our boat. "She's the wooden twelve footer on the last HIDB mooring." "How's she made fast to the buoy?" he asked. "We chained her to it." "Good. - Not that it makes much difference, they come off anyway - mine's the fishing boat on the next mooring, she come off in a gale like this a few months ago but we got to her in time. But see that wreck there, up on the shore?" - we nodded - "That's one of my mate's boats. It was smashed up last winter before we could do anything about it." It was a gloomy afternoon tea.

We had promised our friend that we would take him sailing at the weekend, when he was free from work, and we took him out on Loch Dunvegan. A woman with an artfully Pre-Raphaelite coiffure wearing a chunky polychromatic cardigan was picking her way unsteadily across the rocks by the shoreline, arguing all the time with two men carrying a tripod.

"Now yours are what I call real boats, not like all those plastic things" said one of the men, ignoring her. "What are you doing?" we asked. "I'm a photographer - it's a fashion shoot."

As we set off from the shore we saw the Pre-Raphaelite stomp away to a camper van and slam the door. The men shrugged their shoulders and took down the tripod. We sailed off into a brisk force Five laced with horizontal drizzle.

"I don't know why people own sailing boats," observed our friend, "it's always either too windy or it's raining".

We were inclined to agree - but we blamed Skye. We wanted a nice relaxing sailing holiday, somewhere with more sheltered anchorages and less stress. And I thought that I knew somewhere just right. Long ago I had been cycling in Scotland and I happened on a place called Plockton, on the mainland a few miles northeast of the Kyle of Lochalsh. A curve of whitewashed houses overlooks a wooded bay and a loch beyond brimming with islands, ringed by heathery peaks and rocky crags: the sort of view Landseer would have died for. We would go there.

Plockton was beautiful: all I remembered and more. It lacks a campsite but, what the hell, we booked into a B&B. Everyone said that Calum Mackenzie was the man to ask about launching boats. Calum runs the seal trip boat, ("your money back if you see no seals"). His place is easy to find. It's the one with the "I've seen the seals at Plockton" sticker in the window. As always happens whenever I ask about anchoring or mooring in a harbour, Calum just told us to pick up any mooring that was free. - "No problem". We popped Bridget upside down on the foreshore and she became a handy lick for the shaggy Highland Cattle.

If we had dreams of a long voyage from Plockton that would enable us to write the salty yarns our editor craves; the ones that win the coveted "Naylor Noggin" and put your name up there with the nautical giants - we were to be thwarted. An electrical fault in our car meant that we had to dash over to Murcheson's garage in Kyle for the fault to be investigated and return a couple of days later when the necessary spare parts had arrived from Inverness. So we settled into an amenable pattern of morning coffee in the local cafe, a potter about on the Loch in our boats, followed by an evening sampling the fare at one of the many local restaurants. Plockton is a potterer’s paradise. It's the sort of place in which you would rapidly become crabbed and bitter with jealousy if you didn't own a boat. When you row across the bay, you see visiting tourists gazing at you with naked envy from the road by the shore.

But if you do have a boat afloat in the bay, Plockton is somewhere you can relax and get on with life without worrying about going anywhere much. The local one design racing class is a fleet of lovely 14 foot clinker-built dayboats, which lie afloat in the bay, and a small visiting wooden boat is very welcome among them. Plockton is an ideal place to chat to other boat owners, or to lean on the stone parapet of the road and look out at your craft at anchor with a quiet pride. For all those subtle pleasures of boat ownership that don't require you to actually go sailing, Plockton is the place to be.

We did go sailing as well though. And when you do venture out of the bay, you discover an ideal cruising ground for a small boat. Whoever designed the coastal scenery of the West Coast of Scotland clearly had a 32 foot yacht in mind. If you cruise its waters in such a vessel (as I have done) it is marvellously right: there is a perfect level of intricacy in the pilotage and the anchorages are the ideal distance apart. Baggywrinkle cruises these waters too, but it has to be admitted that it can be all a little too big and bleak and exposed for a twelve foot dinghy. The waters around Plockton are different though, and there a small open boat can feel at home.

The small boat owner could spend a whole season quite happily in exploring the islands and rocky sounds around the shores of Loch Carron without ever feeling the need to venture out into the wider waters of the Inner Sound nearby. There are islands big and small, and such a prolific population of local seals that Calum Mackenzie's money is quite secure.

A couple of miles east of Plockton the Loch narrows at Stromeferry and then widens out again into another substantial stretch of water. The voyage to the village of Lochcarron at its head and then back to Plockton is a perfect daysail. You must catch the tide through the narrows, (which runs fairly strongly), but there are few dangers and much to explore on the way. A ruined castle commands the narrows and the sheltered bay beneath it is an ideal place to stop for a coffee break. Loch Kishorn, round the corner to the north of Plockton, is also worth exploring. Its northern shore is dominated by an oil platform construction yard, but the site is at present deserted and the Loch is very peaceful. (When it is in operation the materials come by rail to Stromeferry and are then taken by barge round the corner to the yard, and they say that it all gets quite lively.) On the way to Loch Kishorn there are yet more islands to explore.

Our only overnight voyage in Baggywrinkle was a trip out to the Crowlin Islands in the Inner Sound. This should have been a very modest trip, but the weather which had smiled on us for our first few days at Plockton decided to get more difficult. A forecast southerly had much more west in it than south, and made the voyage out a beat all the way. The wind could not make up its mind whether to lay us low in brisk rain squalls that had us plodding along on fully reefed main and no jib, or to becalm us in a nasty chop. What would have been a nine mile sail in a straight line eventually took us some eight hours, and we were tired, wet and cold by the time we rowed in to the deep rocky cleft between the two larger Crowlins that forms an admirably sheltered harbour.

Until I looked in a glossary of Gaelic I imagined that Scottish islands had wild and romantic names, but actually the Gaelic usually translates as something remarkably commonplace. The Crowlins are no exception. The three islands are called Eilean M6r, Eilean Beg, and Eilean Meadhonach, which roughly translate as the Big Island, the Small Island and the Medium-sized Island. But if their names may be banal, the scenery is not: the Crowlin islands are wildly beautiful. A handful of ruined houses on Eilean M6r stand as a testament to a human settlement at one time, and there is an automated lighthouse on Eilean Beg, but they are the only signs of human presence. We put up the cover and lay in bed listening to the seals barking around us.

At high water it is possible for a dinghy to navigate the a narrow passage through the rock cleft at the southern end of the harbour, and it was by this means that we ventured out again the next morning into the Inner Sound for the sail back to Plockton. The wind was fair and even if the sun was watery there was no rain. We made good time back into Loch Carron, and took the inshore passages through the islands just to the north of Plockton. These are the sort of secret passages Baggywrinkle likes, places that no one would dare to take a yacht, but ideal for a little cruising dinghy to explore.

As we slipped back into Plockton bay we knew that it was time to leave the fair waters of Scotland and return to the strong tides of the Humber and the muddy estuaries of the Northwest coast of England, that are our local cruising ground. I do not know how long it will be before Baggywrinkle returns to the waters around Plockton. There is much of beauty and interest, but it is a very long way to tow a boat. There are other Scottish waters rather further south that are just as interesting, (such as the sea lochs around Crinan), and rather less than two days drive from Sheffield, that will probably draw us back first. But Plockton is wonderful. Do go there some day.