At 6.50am on Sunday, I’m standing at Rum’s pier handing out life jackets to half a dozen people.

Before this weekend, they were strangers, saying a quick hello at the kettle or holding a door open while they walked through the hostel with heavy hiking bags. But today, they’re leaving as friends - being stranded on an island together will do that to anyone.

We had known the bad weather was coming for days. A look at the forecast earlier in the week showed a nasty four day stretch with a brief reprieve on Saturday - but we weren’t to know the chaos that would soon befall us.

Most of our guests arrived on Wednesday. Not entirely unusual, but mid-week check-ins usually tend to leave by the time the weekend arrives. But when Friday’s sailings were cancelled due to a mix of bad weather and broken lifeboats, it was time to remake the beds and hunker down for another night on Rum.

It wasn’t entirely catastrophic - the weather was due to clear up tomorrow morning, and there were three boats scheduled. Oh, wait, make that two - that’ll be the first passenger service cancelled due to weather. Aaaand there goes the big boat - turns out that lifeboat would take a little longer to fix after all.

I took a pay cut to move to Rum – and it changed how I think about money

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