Monday 14 October

It's a bright and sunny morning, with only a few clouds on the southern horizon. No major changes anticipated over the next day or two. Our old freight ferry Muirneag is now on the home strait, 60 miles south of Athens in the Aegean and 450 miles southwest of Istanbul. She has received orders to proceed to Samsun, 380 miles to the east of Istanbul on the coast of the Black Sea. However, I will only monitor Muirneag's progress as far as Istanbul.



In the evening, Muirneag is on the last 24 hours of her journey to Istanbul, presently 100 miles east of Athens and 110 miles west of Izmir, Turkey; the distance to Istanbul is 450 miles. Tomorrow morning, she will pass the site of the Gallipoli landings of 1915, in which tens of thousands of soldiers from both sides lost their lives. I shall post a tribute to the dozen servicemen from the Isle of Lewis who were killed there in 1915; it is fitting as Muirneag has come all the way from Lewis since October 3rd.

At 10 pm, I received word that the aurora borealis was visible in the Outer Hebrides, so I went out to Mossend to take pics. It was quite some display, with curtains of green light swinging above the horizon. I took the below pictures with a 60 second exposure.