SAILING DIRECTIONS - WORK IN PROGRESS

The Clyde Cruising Club Sailing Directions continue to be used by people who sail in the waters around Scotland.

To help keep the information up-to-date Iain and I work on the text of the Sailing Directions for Orkney and Shetland.  It's all good stuff... he does the sections to do with navigation and passage information and I dot the i's and cross the t's.

This is what the publisher's blurb says about the Directions:

ORKNEY and SHETLAND ISLANDS - Including North and Northeast Scotland

This is a completely new book in which the previously separate volumes covering the Orkney and Shetland Islands have been combined into one. This also includes the principal harbours and anchorages on the north and northeast coast of Scotland from Cape Wrath to Inverness. Passage notes for the Scottish coast and out to the Northern Isles, including Fair Isle, are also included and the Pentland Firth section has been substantially re-written and expanded.

Published by Imray (2016) - 150pp – Spiral Bound – ISBN 978-1846235795 - £35.00 plus p&

In 2016 we did a major re-write of the previous publications which were in 2 volumes.  Here is a photo of Iain talking to a local lad as we checked out information standing on the  hillside above Ronas Voe, Shetland.  Iain wanted to know where to anchor a yacht if, say, you wanted to climb the only hill, Ronas Hill, (the only one of any appreciable size in Shetland and is on this loch or 'voe').  It is a very long voe and is second only to the biggest one in Shetland, Sullum Voe, where the oil comes in.

We have been working hard reading the text and making the changes.  Having 2 pairs of eyes is big help as we find, with our advancing years, that our eyes get tired first reading the manuscript and then accurately marking up the copy using Iain's lap-top.

The job is now without its funny side, however....

Here is the page which relates to Ronas Voe.  As usual we carefully checked the spelling in the text and also made sure that there were no discrepancies between places names in the text and the charts (yellow colour for the land in the box).

A couple of weeks ago we attended the Bearsden Fiddlers Annual Rally in Milngavie Town Hall. When we opened the programme we had a chuckle at a typo in the programme: in the list of tunes to be played was a waltz called 'Rona's Voe'.