The rest is gradually being written (come back later (August?)!)

Previous [Island of Hoy] Prologue Before the tour Day 1 [Linlithgow to Gairloch] Day 2 [Gairloch to Tongue] Day 3 [Tongue to Stromness] Day 4 [Around Orkney Mainland] Day 5 [Island of Hoy] Day 6 [Back to Gairloch (with a diversion)] Day 7 [Gairloch to Linlithgow] Epilogue Aftermath Next [Gairloch to Linlithgow]     Gallery The full gallery Links Other Atrophy pages

(Photo time: 2007:06:01 09:38:18) (Photo time: 2007:06:01 18:06:48) Two (random) pictures from day 6's part of the gallery. Click for smaller thumbnails Click on any image to get a bigger picture in a new window; from this you can click on "prev" or "next" to see the previous or next picture. You can also click on the "more" link to view the gallery.

Day 6, 1st June: [Back to Gairloch (with a diversion)]

The weather was poor, so rather than tour, we went up to this lighthouse, which was something of a twitcher's paradise.

We spent ages just watching them and many other birds nesting on the cliffs, the flying skills of these birds in the extremely gusty conditions were almost unbelievable.

You could see how the puffins could be netted by the score, as was done years ago for food. Hmm. Puffin pie.

On the way back to the hotel, we diverted to a farmer's field (no, we parked the bikes on the hotel's drive). Apparently, during the war, fuel was stored in bunkers underground here. Peter wanted to see if there was anything interesting here, but after a walk through the wet grass (that seems to be the only time my boots let in water) and a look in these bunkers, there were just a few rusty tanks and pipes, not worth visiting. Peter will know that for the next tour here.

We now came to one of the tour's highlights, a visit to the Search And Rescue (SAR) facility at Sumburgh Airport.

This facility, paid for by BP, is set up to serve their oil and gas rigs in the North Sea.

There we were greeted by Nick the pilot we met earlier, and he gave us a very interesting tour of their operations area. The map in the picture (appologies for misty appearance, my camera fogged with condensation) has a very low tech mechanism for finding the distance to a target, a string, pulled through an eye at the airport position to the target position on the map, pulls a pointer up the side of the map to show range. Simple, effective, reliable, accurate enough.

He then took us into the hanger, where we were allowed in the helicopter (one of two they have), and shown the equipment they use, from the weights they use to drop the winch lines in the wind to the high-tech camera, medical supplies, resuscitation equipment (they once re-started a man's heart three times in transit to a hospital, he lived!).

Altogether an extremely enjoyable end to the morning, and (hopefully) to become a regular for Peter's Shetlands tour.

In the afternoon we went up to Bigton, where there is a "tombolo", a narrow double-sided beach that joins to St Ninian's Isle. A bonxie (great skua) was crouched on the sand, at first we thought it might be nesting. As we approached, it looked warily at us. A bit closer and it half hopped, half flew a little further. Injured? Closer still, and it eventually gathered itself together and flew off. We came to the conclusion it was just plain tired, probably having come through some of the very stormy weather that was around

That evening I found a few Shetland ponies grazing in the hotel grounds, I couldn't leave without photgraphing a Shetland pony, even though these weren't wild ones.

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