Friday 9 September

Overcast and wet, but no wind to speak of. Quite a few boats in port today. The Froyhav and Roy Kristian are well-boats, used to transport young salmon to fish farms.



The yacht is the Cary Ali, registered in the Marshall Islands, in the middle of the Pacific.



And we even had a tall-ship in, the Soerlandet, a Norwegian training vessel.



This was, as I said, a calm day. Over the next few days, things are going to get progressively worse. Monday shows winds of force 9 to 11 on the forecast - as Katia comes to gives us an old-fashioned "winter storm", to quote the National Hurricane Center in Miami. We in Scotland get warnings from the NHC? Oh my goodness, I'd better batten down those hatches!

Thursday 8 September

Quite a reasonable day in terms of weather. Still busy monitoring no fewer than four tropical cyclones - Katia, Maria, Nate and Kulap. Dire warnings are appearing about Katia, which has the British Isles in its crosshairs for early next week. The Metcheck website had a gremlin in its forecast, warning us of 220 mph winds. Well, we do get high winds here, for sure, but not that bad.

I have started transcribing WW2 tributes from the Stornoway Gazette, which should appear on the Internet in the next week or so.It is noticeable that the rate of tributes falls off sharply as the year 1942 progresses, which shows that the RAF has won the battle of the skies, and that the U-boats are losing the battle of the seas. I have more than 100 articles to transcribe.