Wednesday 11th June

I woke up fairly early and thought I’d go for a shower and see what the fresh water arrangements were like for topping up my tanks. The village was quiet, no one around but the showers were good, several coathooks and a shelf for putting things on and big enough that the floor outside the shower area didn’t get wet anyway so I had a nice shower and pottered back to the boat and did some blogging. Ailsa was up by about 0730 and  we had porridge and tea and left the pontoon at about 0800.

Loch Ness was perfectly still with reflections of the mountains in the water. We motored for a couple of hours, we  kept a bit of a look out for Nessie but in fact spent a fair amount of time playing bridge on our telephones with each other as partners. Arriving at Urquhart we dropped anchor off the  Castle. The Loch, part of the Great Glen, obviously, is steep sided and I wasn’t sure that we’d have enough room to drop anchor without being on the beach as we only have 60 metres of (beautifully re galvanised) chain but it turned out that there was enough room without the need for heart palpitations and we dropped the anchor in about 15 metres of water ending up, once settled, in about 5 metres. I pumped up the dinghy (with my ridiculous looking little Chines air pump which, although not fast, does pump the dinghies up without trouble) and we plonked her in the water. There are a couple of pontoons at the Castle but it appeared that these had been put in for  the big sightseeing boats and for the wee motor cruisers that can be hired from Loch Oich and I didn’t want to upset anyone so prefer not to force myself into possibly unwelcoming places. Rowing ashore, in the shadow of the keep, we were met by a warden who initially thought we couldn’t land here but upon checking with one of about 8 million other wardens changed his mind and opened some barriers for us. We walked up a path to another warden who pointed us to the ‘Visitor centre’ where we  mingled with the tourists in the gift shop and ended up splitting up as Ailsa queued at the gift shop counter whilst I went to the entrance and the ticket office. At the ticket office they said, ‘Oh, are you the ones from the dinghy’ and having established that we were in fact those from the dinghy  and that it was possible to buy tickets both at the ticked office and at the gift shop I decided to re join Ailsa as it was likely that she was now buying tickets. At the bottom of the  stairs there seemed to be a coachload of tourist fighting their way into the  gift shop so I went in via the ‘do not enter’ door and found Ailsa in the process of buying some old gits tickets for us.

As a film show was on offer and about to start we watched that, learning a bit about the history of the castle before it had been abandoned in the 1600s and then wandered around the remains. It is a very popular tourist attraction, I suppose because everyone wants to tick off Loch Ness on their travels around the Highlands and once here and having gone monster spotting there’s a bit of a need to do other stuff. As castles go it’s fine but mostly ruined and a healthy imagination is needed  to be able to understand what different bits and pieces of it were used for.

Once we’d ‘done’ it we rowed back to the boat and had a sandwich and slice of cake for lunch before weighing anchor and heading, initially for Dores but having decided we wanted to be back in Fort Ausgustus for the following day then changed our minds and went to Foyers.

Some unsatisfactory bridge was attempted but we kept losing signal so gave up. At Foyers there were some moorings and a quay which we assumed we’d not be welcome at so dropped the anchor in charted depth of 45 metres but, in fact, 15 metres and brought up in 1.5 metres.

After a certain amount of swearing I set the anchor alarm too and we had a gin and tonic with some crisps in the gorgeous sunshine. The trees ashore are Scot’s pines  very attractive and there’s a nice beach which may well be good for a barbecue at some point.

I used a couple of leftover hamburgers from the barbecue last Saturday to rustle up a shepherd's pie which followed some asparagus, bought from the garage in Fort Augustus, which we had as a starter. This because  the shephard’s pie took longer than anticipated when the oven didn’t light to warm up when I had thought that it had.