It's a long way to Port Ellen, if you wanna take the ferry!

*Ross you are a bloody legend mate, deadset legend*

After some heavy goodbyes it was time for us to leave London and make our way back to Islay, Bessie and work. However, our return to Islay was delayed a few times… first it was a storm that cancelled our ferry from the mainland to Islay. We were travelling on a bus and less than 30 minutes from the ferry terminal when we learned that the ferry had been cancelled and the next one might be in eight hours’ time. Fortunately for us we made the most of this unfortunate event and ended up doing a side quest to see the distilleries of Campbeltown. We joined a warehouse tasting at Cadenheads, established in 1842 and known as Scotland’s oldest independent bottler. We bonded with the Peruvian guide who it turns out used to be a guide for the Inca trail, we shared some stories of our time on the Inca trail. Somehow our whisky glasses got a lot more full after that…

At the end of the tasting we checked the ferry schedule and learned that it would not be sailing today and we need to try again tomorrow, so we found ourselves a hotel for the night and enjoyed a curry.

The next day we learned that there would not be any sailings until the next day but for essential passengers only and that we could not be booked on a ferry until the Saturday (5 days time…) so we moved hotels for the 2nd night.

‘Essential passengers only’ – of course this meant that when we bumped into an American who was going to Islay on a golf holiday in the lobby of our next hotel, he informed us that he was booked on the next day’s ferry. So I called CalMac the ferry company for the fourth time (that day), only to be informed that they could not book me on a ferry for another 4 days thanks to inexplicable ‘technical faults’ on the ferry.

The Islay community were in an absolute uproar and we felt like true ‘locals’ with our own story of being messed around by the ferry and stranded for days on the mainland.

Meanwhile, whilst we were away we left Bessie at a local Islay legend’s property, Ross, had allowed us to park Bessie on his land while were off the island and had been allowing us to park on his property a few nights per week so we can have electrical hook up in the months prior. Little did we know how lucky we were to have Ross looking out for us, because during the storm one of Bessie’s skylights got ripped clean off leaving a hole in the roof for rain to soak the inside of the van. Ross found our skylight on his driveway and leapt into action creating a makeshift watertight skylight out of wood to seal Bessie to the elements again. His craftsmanship was incredible, managing to secure the new skylight without screwing anything into Bess so that there would be no damage. We were so incredibly grateful for his help at a time we were completely unable to do anything; we shudder to think of what chaos we would have returned to if we had left Bessie parked anywhere but Ross’ place. And in true Islay fashion, Ross’ response to our calls of thanks were always “Nae bother”; the Scottish equivalent of “no worries”! Deadset legend.

The next day, stressed about the state of Bessie and getting no word from CalMac, we distracted ourselves with a tour of Springbank distillery, which our new Peruvian friend secured for us free of charge. The distillery was like an old, well used, messy kitchen – everything has its place and there is a lot of love going into it, but it’s just pure chaos! It was certainly not the sparkly clean or new kind of distillery that we’ve seen in our time in the whisky industry. We’ve realised we now have higher expectations of tour guides now that we’ve have had experience behind the scenes; but we still continue to learn something new from every tour and whisky experience we do.

The whole time we were nervously following the ferry updates just in case we needed to quickly get ourselves to the terminal. In the end we had heard that if you just show up at the ferry terminal there is a good chance that you would get on as a foot passenger. So we did, with success and finally set sail to Islay and our injured Bessie. All up we missed 3 days of work at Lagavulin and required accommodation for 2 nights.

On arrival we received another warm welcome from Auds and Neillie, who picked us from Port Askaig and took us to pick up Bessie, helped refill our gas bottles and took us for lunch. The sun was shining, the damage to Bessie was contained and with only 2 weeks of work left at Lagavulin the countdown to when we leave Islay had well and truly crept up on us.