Waiting for weather

Four days of low cloud over Reine, and the only relaxed person in the room is the one who has already decided we are not going out.

In the north, weather is not an obstacle to the schedule. It is the schedule. The boats, the passes, the light — all of it is decided by a system arriving from the west, and the only real skill is knowing which windows are worth spending.

A guide who takes a group out in the wrong conditions is not being brave. They are managing your disappointment instead of your day, usually because they have a fixed itinerary and someone else's booking to protect.

What a good no looks like: it comes early, it comes with a reason you can check yourself, and it comes with a second plan already made. The bad no arrives at the trailhead.

We have turned around twice this year on this stretch of coast. Both times the group ended up somewhere they would not have chosen and would not now give back — a bakery in Å for three hours, and a boathouse where a fisherman explained, at length and with diagrams, why we were right not to go.

The photograph at the top of this note was taken on the fifth morning. The forecast had said nothing about it.