A Sunday excursion

 Julian went out to check on Robinetta on Saturday, which was the first calm day since she went in the water. There he discovered that we had not plugged in the solar panel, and had accidentally left the radio on. A week of rain meant that the automatic pump had run quite often, so now the battery was flat.

Robinetta has two batteries, so he switched to the second one, and started the engine to charge the flat battery as well as hooking up the Solar panel. Running a marine diesel engine designed for propulsion solely to charge a battery is not good for it, and we had guests coming for lunch, so the battery only got a short charge. He manually pumped the bilges before coming ashore, as the electric pump did not seem to be working.

After our guests left we rowed out together as Julian wanted to check the electric pump connections. He immediately discovered that he had been trying to use it from the flat battery and it did work! However it was nice to get on board.

Sunday was another windless day, although rather damp. I had thought it might be good to motor round to Kilcreggan and anchor to go to the pub, but the rain put me off. None the less we headed out to Robinetta, with the idea of motoring up the Gairloch to charge the flat battery. The engine started without problem on the spare battery, and we dropped the mooring buoy at noon to head up towards Faslane.

By the time we were half way up the loch the drizzle had stopped and we were able to enjoy the surroundings. We were nearly past Faslane when I saw a plastic drink bottle floating on the water. This was a great excuse to have a play at maneuvering. Not exactly man overboard, but plastic flotsom retrieval is always a good idea...

It took fifteen minutes before Julian managed to get the boat hook on it (I had failed three times to catch it in a bucket) and I have no idea what any watchers at the base thought we were doing, but success and the better weather made us decide to go all the way to the head of the loch and pick up one of the 3 moorings supposedly belonging to the Anchor Pub.

There are several moorings near the pub, all of them different, and none labelled as belonging to the Anchor Pub. Given there was no wind, and very little tide we were happy to pick up any of the vacant moorings in deep enough water and row over in Worm to the pub for lunch. 

The Anchor is a pleasant pub, with good beer and food. Well worth the visit. They were surprised to hear we had arrived by boat, and none of the staff knew which were their moorings, or when they were last serviced, although the lady working in the kitchen could remember that they used to be serviced... We will go again, but probably only on a calm day like today.

We arrived back on our home mooring at 15:50, with a fully charged battery, having had a pleasant trip exploring our local surroundings.