An adventure to St Kilda

Marsali Taylor swaps skippering her Offshore 8m for being crew on a converted herring drifter, with comfy berths in the former fish hold

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Messing about in the voe with my own Karima S is a lot of fun, but I try to have a bigger adventure each summer, and this was to be a cracking good one: to St Kilda and the western isles aboard Shetland's own tall ship, Swan.

This 67ft former fishing boat, the largest ever built in Shetland in 1900, was rescued as a wreck in 1989 and is now a sail training vessel taking people of all ages both around the archipelago and further afield. We Shetlanders are immensely proud of her, and school pupils whose great-grandfathers crewed in fishing boats like her always enjoy their days aboard. She has eight berths for trainees in the former fish hold, now a comfortable wood-lined cabin, plus another five berths aft for crew.

Like my fellow Sørlandet trainee, Ellen, from Norway, I had an ambition to see the Western Isles under sail. I suggested to my never-sailed-before big sister Joan that she might like to give it a go, as Swan offers mattressed berths set into the wall, with a reading light and a privacy curtain, and I knew the food would be good.

It turned out she'd always wanted to see St Kilda too, so we all enlisted together. Ellen and I met in Aberdeen on 21 May, and took the train to Joan's house at Brora, on the east coast. We had a sociable evening - as a fellow-weaver, Ellen loved Joan’s studio. Next morning, Joan drove us through beautiful hills to Ullapool, where Swan waited at the bottom of a precipitously high pier (tidal height in Loch Broom is up to 5m at springs). We were greeted by Maggie Adamson, Swan's skipper and current Offshore Double-Handed World Champion for Great Britain.

Full ship

There were eight of us. As a