Shortly after we have passed the notorious Cape Wrath a part of the crew have persuaded Erik to deliver a little lecture. Erik is Danish-Canadian and has for years worked as a geologist in Canada.
He points to Cape Wrath.
"Those rocks consist of granite. They are about 2000-4000 million years old. But those rocks - Erik points a little bit further to the south - consist of sandstone. They are only about 1000 million years old."
The granite rocks of Cape Wrath are light in the colours and have been shaped round by the sea, the wind and the ice of the Ice Age, which once covered Northern Europe. The rocks of sandstone are on the other hand jagged and rise vertically towards the sky as bricks ackwardly piled up on each other.
The result is visible here along the coast in the shape of 40-50 m. high "towers" of sandstone. Many of them wider at the top than in the bottom. Images with feet of clay that one day will tumble down into the sea.
Erik tells about the continental drift; the slow movement of the continents towards and away from each other during the history of the earth.
The scenery is fantastic to view from the sea. Inside the Scottish Highlands the steep mountains are rising. They look like volcanoes but are mountains where the tops have been above the glaciers and therefore haven't been shaped round and flat as the rest of the Scottish Highlands.
"The landscape you are looking at now has nothing to do with the landscapes that characterized the earth thousand million years ago. At that time there was only land and oceans. There was no life on the earth. This landscape has been shaped by the many Ice Ages. Ice Ages that are occuring frequently and are related to the changing orbits of the earth."
It's incredible difficult to understand the perspectives of time which geologists are working with. We also start talking about the global warming. But we realize that we disagree as much as all the experts and the politicians of the world.
According to geologists the temperatures of the earth have always changed in a cycle which has wiped out entire races and given rise to others. "Survival of the fittest" as Darwin described it. Erik tells about periods in the long history of the earth where nearly 95% of all life died out because of climatic changes.
The best known example is probably the dinosaurs who died out after a gigantic meteor hit North America. The impact was so tremendous that a dramatic change of the living conditions on the earth occured. It can be compared with a nuclear winter. Even though we mostly talk about global warming at the time, we are actually headed for the next Ice Age. If the previous pattern continues it might come within 5000 years.
A crew member ask: "But how would you then explain that the glaciers in Greenland are melting?"
"It's something they always have done. Glaciers arise and glaciers disappear. In the Viking Age there wasn't so many glaciers in Greenland as there is today. In the Middle Ages it suddenly became much colder. The glaciers grew and the Viking vanished from Greenland."
I'm sitting for myself afterwards, thinking that we are all probably right: The temperatures of the earth have changed in a certain cycle for thousand million of years which doesn't have any thing to do with mankind since we only have been on the earth in a very short period of its history. But on the other side the climatic changes of the last decades can't be explained within this cycle, they can only be explained by the pollution created by humans!?
Towards evening we call at Lochinver. A small harbour hidden at the bottom of a bay well protected against the untamed forces of the Atlantic Ocean.
A mile or two from the harbour - between the skerries farthest out - is a very odd tower. It looks most of all like a big empty bird cage. The hotel keeper at Culag Hotel explains that it is a tocsin, which warns the village of heavy sea when nature releases its forces. But on the Sea Stallion we are playing with the idea that it is a cage where the locals coop up undesirable visitors.
But we are not undesirable visitors. When we put in at the quay a lot of locals are wating in their cars and drive our luggage to the nearby village hall.
At midnight I fall into a sound sleep with the taste of Tallisker whiskey and Guinness in my mouth.
Today is a day of rest. I have been resting on some stones in the river that runs out at Lochinver. Enjoying the solitude and the gurgling of the stream.