Recovering in The Forss House Hotel after a night of drinking and some time with the locals before we re-laid the decoys at Saorach and walked up to The White Loch before dusk and was amazed to see some geese had landed on my loch. Around five skeins and over fifty geese settled in all
A lay in after a poor night, having drunk too much alcohol and eaten too much food. There was heavy rain overnight and again this morning, but I still gave the dogs a run before breakfast. They had settled well into the car and were really no trouble considering Ben does not usually like being separated from his mother and Sam was not used to sharing. The meal with the others but a little later than usual. Then time for some training on the lawn and I was surprised to find that Sam was by far the most cooperative and obedient but then I supposed that he was beginning to regard The Forss House Hotel as one of his homes!
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I decided that we should undertake the drive to see Peter McGregor at The Borgie Lodge and, upon arrival, we drank their tea and ate their biscuits before he established for us that there were other shooters on the land that he had in mind for geese. We still helped him move a large freezer into the main house and he and his wife (Jackie?) were very grateful. There is some good salmon fishing nearby and Nigel is thinking of coming back in the spring to learn the sport. It was about time for some lunch and so we dropped off at a remote pub nearby and met a bunch of locals. Two of them were brothers-in-law from Inverness and dead drunk and we gave them a lift home even though one started mouthing anti-English abuse. This earned us their undying friendship fortified to extremes by the alcohol.
The best thing was that we met a Mr Tom Weston from Kirtomy, a retired keeper and local shooter, and arranged for him to take us out on Thursday to shoot some geese over decoys. The worst thing was that he had to telephone later on with apologies that he had to take his blind wife to a RNIB exhibition of aids which we agreed was more important. I dropped Nigel off at the hotel to rest and do some reading and then took Jim up to Broubster to try to walk up some grouse with the dogs but did not find any.
Then we relaid the decoys at Saorach and walked up to The White Loch before dusk and was amazed to see some geese had landed on my loch. Around five skeins and over fifty geese settled in all which was to give us an important alternative to Saorach and Thormaid later in the week. It had rained steadily throughout all this and we were pleased to get back to the hotel for a bath and dinner. I decided to adopt the same feeding pattern for Sam as for Ben which was a single large heaped bowl of food at night and none in the morning now that he is more than a year old.