Some kids were hanging out on the back of the ferry. Then there were screams. Turns out that they didn’t know about waves that break over the back of the boat and go EVERYWHERE.
Those brave children warned us, and we heeded their warning.
Also, all their dry stuff was in the luggage bins, which were inaccessible because they were, unsurprisingly, on the back of the ferry.
It was rough enough that unless you really knew what you were doing, you’d want to be hanging onto something. Nobody threw up, but I think a few folk were close, and I wasn’t feeling 100% great by the end of it. Stood for a while, but then a succession of lurches kind of forced me back to my seat, because I couldn’t recover my balance quickly enough.
The waves were coming in from not quite side on, so the roll was a complex movement. Sometimes the boat felt like one hull was getting air time, then slammed down hard. Probably only spray hitting the side windows, but it could have been the actual waves; Not like I could tell.
A mistake I’ve made a few times now is to book a late bus/ferry/whatever, without thinking about what I was going to do in the time between check-out & boarding. Sometimes there’s no option, because there’s only one choice, but in this case I just didn’t think. Fortunately, the hotel let me store my bag, so I wasn’t schlepping all my stuff around.
Their storage room was also their spare building supplies storage room, and was maybe leftover space from a construction or refit? Huge space with stuff piled everywhere.
The shuttle bus to Bluff, where the ferry leaves from, turned out to be a rental van because something had gone wrong with their branded vehicle. I spotted the correct logo on the driver’s jacket at about the same point that she started approaching people in the vicinity & asking if they were her passengers, so that worked out eventually; An older couple with some packs turned out to be the other ones from that location.
There were another two from the airport, one of whom was late because of some nightmare missed flight further up the line. The baggage situation got interesting, because the van wasn’t really suited for suitcases & packs; Lots of seats, but no storage.
Ferry boarding was … laid-back. Checked baggage turned out to be “put it in one of those bins, which we load onto the boat”. They issued me with a boarding pass, which was a little plastic card that they took off you again when you boarded, so I guess the idea is that they want to tell the difference between the passengers & their ride to the terminal without having to separate them in the terminal?
I can also report that people do exactly the same thing for luggage collection from the bins that they do at airport baggage collection carousels; Stand right next to the fucking thing and don’t consider that just because their bag isn’t in that particular bin, it doesn’t mean that nobody else’s is either.
Oban township is tiny; Walked to the backpackers hostel in maybe ten minutes, and that’s at a relaxed pace with frequent map-checking.