Last week was another one of those weird weather conditions you have along the Scottish seashore. Best know here as the sea haar. You usually get it at the east coast when warm air is moving over the cold North Sea but even at the west coast you can have some haar when it is extremely hot (for Scottish conditions).
On 17 and 18 August I went with a group from Sheffield to do sea kayaking from Kyleakin in Skye along the coast to Port Lunge and then to Uags bothy to camp at the field next to it. The paddle was pretty good with a lot of sunshine and over 25C to contend with. Kind of T-shirt and shorts weather, which I had a few times on kayaking trips this year but none whatsoever last year. For some reason the the midges haven’t been too bad most of this summer but in August they have appear with a vengeance and are out for blood. I can only once remember them to be as bad as this and I had to escape off a climb back then to safe my red dotted skin. This time I had to use some fancy technique to get into the tent with as few beasties getting in as possible. Part of it was to go for a run and the dart inside the tent as quickly as possible. It was so bad that whenever I turned on my headtorch it sounded like it was raining, but it wasn’t. It was bloodsuckers trying to get into my tent. It was the first time I actually had to hose down the flysheets of my tents to get rid of all the dead midges.
Anyway back to the sea haar. On day 2 we woke up to some fog over the sea and the Crowlin Islands kept disappearing and reappearing. After a cappuccino and egg roll breakfast we headed out to the sea and across to Crowlin. This was easy enough to spot but the Longay the next Island was nowhere to be seen in the mist. Just as well I had a GPS with me and I know pretty well where the small island is and sure enough we saw Longay after a 1km paddling. The haar didn’t really give up till we arrived in Kyleakin. It was pretty interesting to see the Skye bridge in fog too.