Scotland is sailing's best kept secret

Among the glorious shores of these islands, there is one of the best-kept secrets of sailing.

It’s a ragged and rocky coastline that is blessed with the sort of idyllic, empty sandy beaches stretching on for miles that would make Tom Hanks’s castaway shake from method acting-induced PTSD. Here the blue waters are scattered with islands rising from the depths with the kind of muscular topography that would have your average geography teacher reaching for their colouring-in pencils.

This, my friends, is the west coast of Scotland.

Forget the Caribbean, wonderful though the punch, the people and the terribly reliable temperature all are. The untouched beaches of the Western Isles are every bit as beautiful, just permanently 15 degrees Celsius colder.

Ignore the Mediterranean, with it barren sandy waters, overfished to within an inch of its life since the Augustine and overrun with Frenchman fighting over marina spaces.