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Hi all,

I have added a few people to the email list, so if this is the first news that you have of our "Round England and Wales" trip, you might like to catch up by selecting "News" from TheChalmers.com website.

The story so far. Well we arrived in Inverness (SeaPort Marina, just through the sea locks, through a railway swinging bridge and up two locks), at about 11:30 on Friday. We are still here, chilling out so to speak. With the Scottish weather, chilling out is a bit literal too. We will continue our journey tomorrow, through the locks to the Loch - Loch Ness, to hopefully anchor overnight at Urquart Castle.

The trip up from Hartlepool was again pretty windless, and we used a lot of motor to make good time. Our initial plan was to shelter in Edinburgh for Friday because of a predicted bad storm with Gale force winds which was due. As it turned out, as we neared Edinburgh, the forecast was updated to predict the storm on Monday, and so we diverted for Peterhead, with Inverness our new planned for destination. The updated forecast was updated again to down grade the storm to "fresh winds", so we skipped Peterhead and made our way for Inverness.

We again saw loads of wild life, Puffins, other birds, Seals, Dolphins and a Minke Whale who entertained us for about twenty minutes by rolling over and crossing from one side of Debanessa to the other. At times he/she was really close and the web site has a really clear picture of it about 6 feet from the port side. We were visited by Dolphins on a few occasions, and saw a few more in the distance. The seals were quite humerous, just sticking their heads out of the water, giving us a good look, and then disappearing again. The Puffins were amusing too, trying despirately to get out of our way by flapping thier stubby wings and running like mad, but never getting off the water. They would then dive under the water to "escape".

The pilotage into Inverness was interesting, loads of shallows and very strong tides. We came in at LW + 1 and arrived LW + 3, with a strong tide pushing us under the bridge. We then did a sideways crab to the sea lock against a 3 knot tide.

Pictures are on the web site, select "Pictures" and then "Southampton to Inverness". I have only uploaded a small selection, and lony at 320x240, due to the limitations of this 9.6K mobile phone connection. When we return to ur 64K ISDN connection, I will upload all the photos.

Feel free to reply to these emails, we connect on a daily basis, when we can get a mobile phone connection.

Ricky, Maggie, Nicky and Tarryn

Team Chalmers.com

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