A Sailing Game...
Published on Monday 11th June 2007
My husband always says I don’t like travelling, so for someone who hates to leave home I’ve been away rather a lot this year, and after extolling the virtues of Elemis after a trip to South Africa I am now about to regale you with my exploits sailing in Scotland.
I left home and hopped aboard an Easyjet flight to Inverness where I joined our boat Slip Anchor II, which Nick and his co-owner Clive had sailed up from Southampton.
Four more of us joined up to sail through the Caledonian Canal. It was fascinating and I have never been through so many locks and lochs in my life.
The thing about locks is that they don't work after a certain time in the evening and as it doesn’t get dark until about 11.30pm at this time of year, the evenings can get quite long. As you’d expect, the Canal is a great tourist attraction and has many little shopping opportunities along the way, including some distilleries.
I thought it would be a good excuse to improve my knowledge of the local product, i.e. whisky, and to that end I bought some serious sets of largish 'miniatures' and after the day’s sail, I set up a whisky tasting.
It was remarkable how different our tastes were. Some liked a smoky flavour; some liked the ones with hints of liquorice, a few we unanimously disliked and one or two we all loved. A very pleasant way to spend an early evening whilst swatting the ever present midges.
This little activity set us off on a new track as we worked our way along the Canal, trying the very local whisky wherever we moored for the night, and after seven days we were becoming quite the experts.
 Now I’m back home I’ve been online and discovered several of our favourites on the Fortnum and Mason  website, a 15 year old Balvenie, and an 18 year old Bunnahabhain both utterly delicious, although while you’re there I notice they do have a 50 year old Glenfiddich for £5,500 and Father’s Day is coming up.
Oh and by the way, we did have a very clear sighting of the monster in Loch Ness but I’m not saying whether that was before or after I introduced the new sailing game.
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