ISLAND HOPPING Day - One
I have been absent from here for a while, partly because where I have been has been an area where 4G, 3G, WiFi, mobile phone and in some cases even television coverage been very patchy or totally non-existence. You may recall I have a silly quest this year to visit as many islands as possible.
This is my first major attempt to do this. My plan ?
Simple, 18 islands in 10 days.
At first, my idea was to do this by bicycle, very often my choice of transport on the islands, but as the numbers of islands grew, I realised that I needed to do this by car, or I might be pushed for time to take photographs of my travels.
So drove up to Ardrossan, and caught the ferry over to Brodick on the island of Arran. I planned to take my time, and get some shots on Arran before I caught the ferry from the west of Arran to take me over to the Mull of Kintyre. This is the small ferry featured in my post today, MV Loch Tarbert. However, strong winds in just the wrong direction were threatening to force the service to be suspended, leaving me stranded on Arran. So I raced across Arran and caught the first possible ferry back off. The service stayed open on Monday, but had closed on the Sunday and then again on the Tuesday, so I think I was lucky.
The crossing was not too bad at all, it is the on the other side that it gets interesting. The concrete jetty has no shelter, and the swell was rolling up and down.
The boatman directed each vehicle down the ramp, one by one, trying to time it so that the ramp and jetty were in contact with each other, and the waves were not rolling across the jetty, trying to give the cars a nice salt water bath.
I landed near Skipness, and spent too long taking photographs of the area including Skipness castle. Suddenly realised the time and shot off to get the ferry over to the Isle of Gigha. Ooops, despite seeing no traffic on the main road down,I was late. I could see the ferry docked. The last 1/2 mile is narrow single track road, there were two very young children riding bikes outside their house, and I stopped to let them get on the grass, then I met a very old man hobbling down the middle of the road and I stopped again to let him pass. Then off again and I could see the ferry had put it's loading ramp up, the traffic lights for the pier had gone to red. I ignored them, and drove on to the pier and stopped about halfway along. I saw a puff of smoke come from the funnel and thought "oh well, I have missed this one, and I would just have to go back to the car park and wait an hour for the last ferry of the day at six."
Next thing I knew the front loading ramp started to come down and I was waved onto the boat. Thank you Captain.
I arrived on Gigha, to discover the area around the ferry was surprisingly busy, well for Gigha anyway.
There was a large lorry parked up, and I was told by a rather excited schoolboy on the ferry, that it visited about 3 times a year. It converts into a mobile cinema, and visits islands and out lying areas that have no access to films and shows a children's film and a more adult one later.
So day one had gone nearly to plan.
Islands visited ; TWO
Ferries used ; THREE
Ports used; SIX
If you wish to see more photos from today, just follow the links.
http://365project.org/markp/Alternatively/11-05-2015
ferry- makes the journey a joy! Have fun!