April 2025
4th June 2025
When I lived on Mull, one of the things that really frustrated me was the ferry service. Don't get me wrong, the staff who run the day-to-day operations for CalMac are brilliant, working tirelessly in often horrendous weather conditions, and having to deal with the fall out of equally horrendous managerial decisions.
Last year I was supposed to be running a workshop with a client who was aiming to get a ferry directly after we'd finished, and I was to drop her at the terminal to meet her partner, to leave the island. I can't recall what went wrong with CalMac on that occasion, but long story short, the tickets for the day my client was due to leave were "cancelled" or something, meaning all bets were off in terms of getting on the boat, regardless of how long a ticket had been booked for.
I only found this out via a friend who I was staying with, who had seen it on social media. Now I could have said nothing, run the workshop and dropped my client off into the chaos at the terminal, but I'm not that sort of person, and it concerned me. So I told my client the evening before the workshop, and as a result of that, ended up cancelling the day, and refunding the whole thing. It had been a late booking anyway, but still, was yet more money lost because of CalMac.
This year, she had rebooked, and had thanked me for a second time for alerting them to the situation, and enabling them to get off Mull and home again as planned. This year she had booked a ferry for a couple of days after the workshop, so hopefully we'd have a change of luck. And that luck was helped when George messaged me early in the day to say he and his clients were watching an otter, and I was welcome to join him if I wanted.
It was where I was heading anyway, so we zipped around to find him, hoping the otter would still be out. She was, and it was "Stumpy" on account of her somewhat shortened tail.
After a fairly lengthy session of tracking the otter, I had positioned my client and I between two huge rocks on the shore, and waited. I had hoped the otter might haul out close by. Initially she didn't, curling up on a rock near where George and his clients were. Fair enough, they deserved some more success. But the tide was returning, and she was washed off the rock she was snoozing on, forcing her to choose somewhere else. After a brief stop on another seaweed-covered rock again near George, she moved close to us, and decided to settle just a few metres away, in a great spot for us to photograph from.
She groomed, rolled around, glanced in the direction of the (by then several) admirers watching from the top of the shore, and chilled out. She has sustained quite a cut on her nose, but it didn't seem to be bothering her. She was pretty tired though, and she slept a few times while we watched. Pregnant, perhaps?
I liked this image of her yawning, as it appears as if she's laughing heartily. Definitely not at one of my jokes... they're renowned for being dreadful. But a wonderful encounter, that made the cancellation, refund and twelve month wait seem worthwhile.
