Continuing my loose "watery" theme for a few more images.
 
Around 45 years ago, when I was at school, I had an extremely enthusiastic Geography teacher who introduced me to the delights of maps and using them in the great outdoors. He would take parties of us away for the weekend or longer during school holidays and my love of walking in the hills has stayed with me to this day.
 
What's that got to do with this image, I hear you say? Well, one lesson that I can still recall was to with the Scottish Islands and he would talk very knowledgeably about places that I still can't pronounce to this day! Some names did stick in my mind – places such as Barra, Benbecula and the Uists. He made them sound wonderful places to visit and one day, I thought, I would like to see them for myself. That day came last year, when I had a week in the Outer Hebrides (also known as the Western Isles). My route to the islands involved a flight up to Glasgow, then picking up a hire car and driving to Oban, one of the main ferry terminals for the west coast Scottish islands, before taking the five hour ferry crossing to the islands.
 
Here, my ferry MV "Clansman" is approaching the terminal in Oban. She was built in 1998 at Appledore in Devon, weighs in at 5500 tons, and is a fraction less than 100m in length. The size looks deceptive here; she can carry 100 cars and 638 passengers. She's an awful lot bigger than the Isle of Wight ferry I featured last week and has a proper bow for coping with the rough seas they they can get up there!

For reasons unknown, she was nearly 40 minutes past her scheduled departure time even before she had docked and disembarked her inbound passengers and cars. However, she had made up most of the lost time and was only 10mins late in docking on Barra.

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