The voyage · a game
Off in a Boat
Take the helm of Thistle from Duntulm, at the north end of Skye, down the outside of the island, south to Oban and then up the Caledonian Canal to Loch Ness, following Neil Gunn’s Off in a Boat, which Mike retraced in 2014. The chart scrolls with you and the coast is drawn from real shoreline data, so the channels are as narrow as they really are.
Portnalong
Sightings
- Dolphins
- Seal
- Basking shark
- Minke whale
- Gannets
- Gulls
Steer close to something alive and it goes in the log.
Helm
← / A steers to port and → / D to starboard; P or Space pauses. Port and starboard are the boat’s own left and right, so when she heads south, starboard is west. On a phone, hold the buttons, or the left or right half of the chart. The small map in the corner shows how far you have come.
Watch the water
Lobster pots snag the boat, rocks hurt the hull, whirlpools tug at the helm and overfalls kick you sideways. Nothing alive will hurt you: sail close to a seal, a pod of dolphins, a basking shark, a whale or a gannet and it scores. In the narrows there is no room to dodge: a cross-tide sets you sideways, and scraping the walls costs hull. Keep to the middle. Once you are in the canal there is nothing to dodge at all. You wait, at Neptune’s Staircase and again at the swing bridge, and the waiting scores too.
The voyage underneath the pixels
The route
From the archive
The 2014 route poster
The tour poster for the 2014 retracing, kept as an archive object. The dates on it are on the In the Wake of Neil Gunn page.
Soundtrack for the voyage
This is an interpretive archive game, not a navigation chart. The coastline is drawn from GSHHG shoreline data at true proportions and every leg was routed through navigable water, but hazards, timing and distances are compressed for play. GSHHG is a shoreline dataset and has no canals in it, so the cuts at Banavie and Laggan were drawn in by hand along the real line, and the channel is exaggerated in width (as, for that matter, is the boat). The voyage ran Duntulm, Portnalong, Eigg, Arisaig, Tobermory, Bunessan, Iona, Oban, Kentallen, up the Caledonian Canal and out at Bona on Loch Ness, and the game now sails all of it.