Weather: Gale force winds and driving rain, later clearing with sunshine and showers but remaining windy.

I had hoped to attend the first outing of the North Uist Angling Club of which I have recently become a member. Unfortunately, however, most of the day was spent listening to the whistle of the wind around the eves accompanied by the sound of the driving rain lashing the front of the house. I am neither skilled or hardy enough to cast a fly in these conditions. This was somewhat disheartening but did give us time to catch up on some office work and essential research (i.e. reading). The house is situated in an exposed position at the top of a hill in a small estate. This makes it difficult to appreciate extreme weather events and we are hoping that this will change the in new house, which is situated in a place that is more in tune with the surrounding environment.

At 4 pm Nicola remarked that she could see the ferry approaching across the bay. Simultaneously the sun appeared and the day was totally and remarkably transformed. We used the opportunity to leave the house, where cabin-fever was beginning to set in, and to walk the short distance to the ferry terminal. There, we watched as the ferry disembarked its relatively few passengers and prepared for its further onward journey. Turning away from the pier the rainclouds moved away towards the mainland and were caught in the sun’s rays for an instant producing a spectacular rainbow. We took some pictures of this rainbow and of the ferry leaving the terminal, which it does remarkably quickly. These two events transformed the day.

As the weather had improved so much we then decided to take a walk down to the small harbour where there were some new boats in view. Shortly along the way a hailstorm passed over us lasting around 10 minutes and we were forced to shelter between two hedges as it flattened the surrounding vegetation and bounced off the path. We finished our walk with a detour past one of the freshwater lochs where we saw some interesting ducks and were excited to see a merlin fly past.

It had been too windy for the cats to venture forth but as the winds died down they went outside in the early hours of the following morning, just to keep us on our toes…