Listening to: Yippi-Yippi-Ye-Ow by the De Zurik Sisters – the mystery here, was this this really a request? Run to the Hills by Tanya Tagaq and Damian Abraham.
The weather here has been really grim. Slackbuie is a sort of micro-climate, with microscopic amounts of sunshine at times, and this time doesn’t even have that. On crisp, clear days, you can see the mountains over Loch Ness from here, a broken line heading towards the big dome that is Meall Fuar-Mhonaidh. I can’t claim that it is an enormous mountain, but listen, 545m ascent and the name means Hill of the Cold Slopes, so this is definitely a climb done in the spirit of the great adventurers. It is Graham – ok? Everyone knows over 3000 feet is a Munro, a Corbett is over 2,500 feet, but a Graham, well it’s a bit smaller. Inside every Slackbuiean beats the heart of a Highlander, and we all know we can run up a mountain and gralloch a deer for breakfast at the top. I have climbed it, Meall Fuar-Mhonaidh, without the aid of oxygen. With blurry vision and sweating like Trump’s speech writer, I crawled up the last few feet and summited! I was immediately hailed by a group of pensioners, pretty much complete with zimmer frames who were all eating their sandwiches at the top. I couldn’t even reply for wheezing and spent the next hour looking for a road with a bus parked on it somewhere near the top.
Now, Loch Ness has been the site of many great mysteries – what exactly is the monster? Did St Columba really bring someone back from the dead on the banks of the loch? What happened when Aleister Crowley lived in Boleskine House? Was anyone ever cured by the traditional remedy for pneumonia – a dunking in the loch? How in the name of God, did a bunch of geriatrics get to the top without even breaking sweat?
The next great mystery of the loch though, has to be why I ever thought trying sailing first time was something you should do on Loch Ness. My pal Iain and I decided we would try sailing. Got a sailing dinghy, read the book – front, back, water – and a life on the briny was calling us old seadogs.
Loch Ness is renowned for the fact that the mountains funnel the winds from the west, and cause dirty great rollers to thunder up the loch. Perhaps it was a little too windy and rough for a first time out in the sailing dinghy, (christened Flapdoodle) but remember, I mentioned in a previous post, I have the blood of Vikings flowing in my veins! The boat set off for the centre of the loch at quite a speed, actually a terrifying speed. I am not sure exactly what speed a bat out of hell goes at, but I m pretty sure we left one for dead, as we clung to the boat for dear life, praying that it was adrenalin that was flowing down my leg.
We got to the middle of the loch and decided to turn. I had read in the book that you shout “Lee Ho” as the swinging thing attached to the mast, swings across. I shouted “Lee Ho” with the best of them, and got a mouthful of peaty water for my troubles as the boat capsized. There is something slightly disconcerting about water so cold you can barely breathe and enough below your feet to submerge skyscrapers. Added to this, the Willox Dixon family are not renowned swimmers. As my wise mother points out, “Only people that go in water can drown”.
From the other side of the boat, a voice shouted about the fact that at that time of year 20 minutes in the water means you don’t need to be rescued. You can always rely on Iain to find the silver lining. Now in the book, it tells you that if the boat capsizes, you haul yourself up on the hull, grab the dagger board and lean back to right the boat. “So what does it say when the fucking dagger board has fallen out and sunk?” was Iain’s snappy reply.
A tourist cruiser came towards us, and we cheered “We are saved!”, till a voice shouted, “We don’t know what to do” and the tourists sailed on their merry way. Things were looking a little bleak when another boat appeared, and this time a voice shouted “It’s the drunken piper, we were just talking about you, but I never thought I would be introducing you to anyone here”. Somehow, humiliation is made so much better when it is in front of people you know, so somewhat ungraciously,I just told the voice to hurry up and get us out.
I tied a rope to the dinghy as Iain tried to climb up the ladder at the back of the cruiser. He really seemed to be struggling, and I was still in the freezing water. As I gave some words of encouragement to Iain, the problem became clear. He had tucked his waterproof trousers into his boots, and now they were like incontinence pants, ballooning out with more than his own body weight in water. When he eventually got on board, the weight of water and gravity struck and the waterproof trousers fell down flooding the beautiful carpeted deck.
We picked up the sailing dinghy on the Friday, insured it on Saturday, wrecked it on Sunday and claimed the insurance on Monday.
There was one plus point. Grandfather of wife of Willox Dixon had given me a pair of trainers, made by convicts in Perth Prison. Now I fully understand that footwear should be functional and not just fashionable, but these monstrosities were clearly the prisoners’ revenge on society. Unfortunately I actually failed to lose them when the boat capsized as they had got caught on the boat somehow, but with a bit of help, they did manage to disappear into the loch. I paid for this falsehood though, as I obviously overplayed the sadness of my great loss, and grandfather of wife brought me another pair.
Atomic Crofter 