One afternoon we took advantage of Dougie's car to replenish our provisions at Tesco's, the UK's answer to Walmart. Their food selection turned out to be quite good, surprisingly so for a big chain store.

On the Sunday I did maintenance on the boat, and on Monday we went with Dougie and his mother, Margaret, northwards along the coast.

From there we went on to Castle Mey, owned by the Royal Family. It is said to have been the preferred summer home of the Queen Mother, and Margaret pointed out to us the small village church where the "Queen Mum" used to attend services.

By mid-afternoon we reached our real objective, Dougie's sister's house. Pat and her husband Don run a bed-and-breakfast and a sheep-croft out on windswept Strathey Point.

We were made warmly welcome, and soon set out on a "wee walkie," out to the lighthouse at the end of Strathey Point.

We were joined by Dougie's nephews and their children, a party of fifteen or so altogether, for an excellent dinner at a (the?) local restaurant. It struck us that Sharvedda would be a lovely place to spend a few days in the summer.

We enjoyed the quiet of the secure harbor, and the industrial shipping activity around us, much of it having to do with material for wind-farms.

One day it looked as though the weather would eventually improve, so we made arrangements for fuel. There is no "fuel dock" as we know it; the boats simply make arrangements with the oil company that is just around the corner in the next part of the harbor, and at the appointed time either the truck comes to one's mooring, or, because we were on the marina floats, we went to lie alongside the wharf by the oil company offices. We found that the Diesel price was not as bad as we had feared, and the situation is helped by an arrangement in Britain that assumes 40% of the fuel taken on by a a good-sized cruising boat is used for heating and power generation and is thus not taxed. The result is fuel that is certainly more expensive than in the US, but not nearly as expensive as on the Continent. We took on 3,000 liters (about what we had used crossing the ocean) and hope not to bunker again until it is time to go back across.

In Wick we sadly said goodbye to Dougie, who stayed on with his family for a couple of days and then returned to Bermuda. He was a good shipmate, and we shall miss him.

On its website, the harbor looked vast and complex, as indeed it is, but I was assured that I had only to hail the harbor control on Channel 12 a few minutes before arriving and we would get directions.

When I went to the harbor office to check in, I found that dockage would be £10 per night or £25 per week. Since we knew we would stay at least two nights, this was not a hard choice. Really, the only drawback to life in Fraserburgh was that we could not get internet on the boat. I did try to pay for a connection, via British Telecomm, but their website would never stay up long enough to complete the transaction, which was perhaps just as well.

The bad weather kept most of the boats in harbor for our first few days, but after that there was constant coming and going. The harbor control tower kept track and directed traffic in the narrow entrance with its sharp turns.

There might be an engine company van alongside a boat while a mechanic worked on it, or a welder, and then the next thing you knew she was taking on ice at the ice plant and heading out again.

We spent quite a lot of time just walking around the various parts of the harbor and watching the boats and the antics of the large seals that seem to live there.

Except for the biggest ones, the trawlers here all have added shelter decks forward, which makes them look a little odd to our eyes, but is very practical in stormy weather. A peculiarity of the rig is that the net lives on a reel aft, but the cod end must be brought forward in order to dump the fish into the fish-hold.

We saw a few ships and many birds: our old friends the fulmars, and this passage there were puffins and small auks doing their terminally cute "rubber ducky" act.

The passage would take us about 50 hours, two full days, so we settled into a relaxed seagoing routine,standing our watches and reading. The first afternoon and evening we saw mainly fishing boats, but early the second morning we began to see more good-sized cargo ships. We were puzzled at first, but soon saw that we were just due north of the northern end of the traffic lanes through the English Channel, so we were seeing all the traffic from the south for ports in Norway.

All day Friday we had ships on the AIS, and occasionally on the radar, and in the evening we saw lights from oil rigs all around the horizon.

At about 09:00 on Saturday morning, just two days after we left, we came to the edge of the traffic lane from the Elbe and Weser Rivers (Hamburg and Bremerhaven) to the English Channel.

We made it all right, by paying close attention, and at 12:32 we were abeam the Westerems Fairway buoy, at the entrance to the channel leading through the mudflats to Borkum and the Ems River.

As we approached the mouth of the Ems itself, we were boarded by the German Küstenwache, who wanted to see our passports and the boat's documentation. We learned later that the coast was locked down for a joint exercise of the various Customs and Immigration authorities.

I had called the harbormaster of the Neptunus Marina in Delfzijl from Scotland, but he said there was no room for us because the bad weather was preventing boats from moving, so we did not know what to expect. We decided to carry on, however, and see what we could manage to work out.