Close call

It has been a spectacularly bad spell of weather yesterday and today.  Heavy rain with a South Westerly gale all day, fortunately the berths are sheltered at Oban and Craignure from this direction, so we have continued running. With the heavy rain the visibility is quite limited and of course at this time of year it is still dark at 8 in the morning.  We were coming into Oban Bay at about 7:30, the seas had been high and the rain was still coming down hard.  I was leaving the stabiliser fins out to the last minute before the narrow entrance.  The port one wasn't for coming in so we slowed right down and kept in to the starboard side to let the engineers sort things out.  We came into the Bay and just after turning towards the berth a small steel hulled fishing boat passed down the port side, it had broken free from its mooring and was drifting quickly across towards the North shore.  No one had seen it in the dark as it had no lights and looked low in the water.  A minute or two earlier and we would have probably hit it square on, if hadn't been for the slow down on the approach it could have been a bad start to the day.

We have continued to run all day, most of the other services are off now, not a good day for travelling anywhere though.