Today we hopped right into the action to do some whale watching. It turns out Gairloch is right on the coast, even though the body of water nearby is called “Loch Gairloch”. I sort of just assumed Loch means “Lake” because of “Loch Ness”, but I bet it has something else to do with some glacier formation or something. Idk, you can look it up on Wikipedia. The point is we could walk from our Inn to go straight into the ocean!
See? That’s the ocean. Also, remember that boat from the cool picture from yesterday?
It’s on land now. There are 16ft tide swings here during the full moon.
Because the Twin and GMac are avid climbers, they split up and went climbing. The rock does look pretty gneiss around here, if you know what I mean. Oh, I should specify this was “rock climbing”. I guess the Scots use “climbing” to refer to things we might consider to be more “hiking”. Anyway, they had a great time! I’ll put some pictures of their adventure at the end, but they can start their own blog.
The whale watching tour we went on was pretty fun. We were on an 11 meter life-saving type boat that handled the waves really well. There were some decent swells and a little bit of mixed chop, but for the most part it was a fine day to be on the water. While we didn’t see any whales, we did get to be part of a pod of dolphins for a little bit. We also saw a ton of black guillemot, razorbill, gulls, and gannets. Wife even spotted some harbor porposies at the end of the journey! They were very tiny, and too difficult to get on video. Oh, also we saw some seals. Here is a video showing us being a dolphin pod.
And here are some photos of us making preparing to make photos and making photos:
I think my favorite part of the whale watching trip was realizing that I had essentially been on a similar type of trip with my parents on the Chesapeake Bay many times. I am definitely lucky to come from a family where we could have our own personal whale watching tour! We even saw a whale once. I’m not mentioning this to minimize this Scotland whale watching trip, just to show my appreciation. People on this boat had never seen dolphins before, and I remember so many times seeing dolphins with my parents.
One highlight of the whale watching trip was when we were by Rona island, and this dude on the boat is looking through his binoculars, and says with absolute confidence, “if anyone is interested, there is an eagle on that rock.” I looked to where we was talking about, and saw a giant seagull. I zoomed in with my camera, and only saw a seagull. Our skipper finally finds wtf he’s talking about and says, “yeah, that’s a seagull”. Fucking idiot.
It was that guy up there.
Anyway, here are a few Garmin data points of where we ended up so you can see where we went. It was super neat to see this part of Scotland from the water! Also, we were super lucky as the wind rolled in for all of the next days, and this was literally the only day we could have gone whale watching.
https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/embed/12138268813
Here’s where that funny dude thought he saw and eagle:
https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/embed/12138887186
After the whale cruise, I wanted to go for a run while we waited for the Climbers to return. I went to the conveince store to try and find some gatorade-like thing. I found a single thing that was close to gatorade. However, it wasn’t until halfway through that I realized it had a TON of caffeine in it. It was like energy gatorade. So my heart was GOING. I decided to run up a mountain, which quickly turned into slogging up a mud bog, but I did get some good views.
And here’s the Garmin of the run:
https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/12140374806
After my run, the climbers returned and we got ready for dinner. While I was showering, GMac and FatherLaw were down at the bar talking to the locals. GMac found a dude, Stuart, who worked on LOFAR, so that was fun. He was also the dude who cooked our breakfast, and apparently was a nature guide in his past life. He told us how to look for otters. We haven’t found any yet, but we are looking! Maybe tomorrow!
Some neat climbing photos from the Climbers:
Oh yeah, and I almost forgot I had this really dumb thing happen to me. So I bought these really expensive wind/rain pants at REI before we left in preparation for the wind/rain in Scotland. I wore them for the whale watching tour, and they worked great, even though we were given bonus waterproof layers. After the whale watching tour, when I went to accidentally buy that energy drink, I could not get the zipper pocket open. This zipper pocket had my wallet, passport, car keys, and room key. Fortunately, Wife was able to pay so I was still able to get that energy drink, but wtf!!! I could not get it unzipped. Ended up having to shove the sharp room key through the pocket and ruining it. Taking these pants back as soon as a I get home. Stupid white people pants.