18 July 2025 – Friday – Oban

After breakfast on board, we took the water taxi from Kerrera marina across the harbor to Oban which is pronounced Obin. We met up with Doug and Dale Bruce who are the final 2 crew for our boat. Kathleen and I went first to the railroad station to get our tickets and reserved seats for our return trip to Glasgow on August 1 at 5:17am. That’s the first train. We needed to be on it in order to make connections back to our flights in the early afternoon. 

Our most important mission was to go to the supermarket to buy perishables and wine. We had already decided that we needed 24 bottles. Of course we bought milk, eggs, cookies, fruit, lettuce, tomatoes and finally Bill and Johanna had ordered meats from a butcher who vacuum packed and flash froze everything for storage. 

We then used two supermarket carts to move everything down towards the docks. We stopped for a lunch of delicious steamed mussels on the dock. Kathleen and I did a little shopping on the way back to our dock to wait for the launch. We met up with several others in the group who had also done some significant shopping. I found out that there are 60 boats in the fleet.  It will be interesting to go to some very tiny harbors with many boats most which cannot fit inside. We shall see. 

We moved our boat off the dock briefly today to accommodate a 72 ft boat that was chartered by a group of our members to cruise with us. The captain and first mate were very capable women. Amazing that women can do this. 🤣

We moved back on the dock outside them and tied up to them, a practice called rafting. Now we get to climb over their boat to reach the dock instead of having them climb on our boat. 

We tied up with them and quickly declared cocktail hour. Johanna and I had made guacamole. We moved into dinner which was delicious salmon from the fishmonger in town as well as string beans and salad. 

We sat and talked for a while and ended up deciding it was bedtime. I am still a bit jet lagged.