Did You Know High Tide in Loch Scridian is at 3 AM Tomorrow?

If you're like me, sometimes you write a few sentences just for the hell of it, entirely irrelevant to anything you're working on. If you're like me, sometimes you squint suspiciously at those sentences as little thoughts begin to bubble and pop in your swamp-brain. If you're like me, sometimes you mutter fuck-fuck-fuck under your breath when that swamp implodes and that brain decides to dive headfirst into building a whole new character, a whole new world, a whole new story around this nebulous new wish-wash of an idea that may or may not lead anywhere but will definitely eat up all the spare time you set aside for the actual projects waiting for you to get your shit together on the side of the road, at least for the next two weeks.

And then comes the random research.

On Iona, folks used to dump mead and porridge into the ocean as an offering to the sea gods in exchange for red tangle seaweed to fertilize their fields.

There's this wild columnar basalt cave on the Isle of Staffa called Fingal's Cave and some stories say it sits directly above the entrance to Hell.

There's a 60-million-year-old, 12-meter-tall Fossil Tree in the side of a sea cliff on Ardmeanach Peninsula. You have to walk 14 miles and descend a rusty ladder to reach it, and there's only an indent left, because visitors keep stealing pieces of the charcoal.

The Black Beach, or Traigh na Cille, is only .14 miles long.

Water booms are sometimes used to corral the bodies of beached whales to keep them in one place and protect them from nibbly sharks before disposal.

The body of Peter Gibbs was found in 1976 by a shepherd smack-dab on a hill on the Isle of Mull 4 months after he took off in his Cessna and never landed. He died of exposure with no traumatic wounds, no parachute, and no sign of the plane.

Bearraich, a "hill" on the Ardmeanach Peninsula, is 1,417 feet tall.

Ulva, a small island off Western Mull, has a walloping population of 6 people.

Sea lochs exist.

Remember that cave? After visiting it in 1892, Felix Mendelssohn wrote the Hebrides overture, aptly named Fingal's Cave, and disliked it so much he re-composed it. The second version was much better.

Whale carcasses are examined by cutting through the blubber with giant blades called flensing knives. The carcasses are often hot to the touch.

... And, tomorrow, high tide in Loch Scridian will be at 3 AM. It'll be 3.4 meters.