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Showing posts from June, 2023

Ten days on Zuza to St Kilda - 11th June - we go ashore in Village Bay

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  We had had a good night anchored just off shore in Village Bay on Hirta,  St Kilda's main island. When we woke up the sky was clear and the visibility good and I felt very proud of being able to make a panorama of the shore from the slightly rolling boat. There was one other small yacht tied up in the bay. The other yacht in the bay with Stac Levenish in the background In the panorama, if you enlarge the picture, you can see the bay, the sandy shore, with the military buildings at the front of the shoreline, the old village spread out some way behind and then a jumble of walls and stones going off into the distance. However by the time we had had breakfast and got out in the dinghy to go on land a fog had descended limiting our views of the hills. It seemed good though to explore in the conditions that must prevail on St Kilda most of the time! As we climbed the jetty I noticed some kelp in the water that looked just like a fish skeleton. St Kilda had been inhabited by man s...

Ten days on Zuza to St Kilda - 10th June - A cruise around Borerey and we arrive in Village Bay

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  St Kilda holds World Heritage Site status twice. Once for its cultural value and once again for its natural environment. It contains the largest colony of seabirds in Northern Europe and its marine environment is heavily protected. When we arrived in St Kilda Neil first took Zuza around the coast of Borerey, a large island with prominent sea stacks. Borerey has a summit of 384 metres and so the cliffs are very steep and there is no place for a boat to tie up. It is 4 miles north west of Hirta, the main island, and no people have lived on it in recent times.  Zuza has a very shallow draft (1.95m) as she has a bilge keel and so is ideal for getting close in to shore. By Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting) - Own workMap drawn using Landsat ETM+ imagery (public domain), CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18273982 The weather was dull and overcast with a weak sun struggling to get through. We motored past  Creagan na Rubhaig Bana and along the north-east ...