All that glistens......

Our friend, Jim Muir, who lived just down the road from us in Polbain, kept us supplied with salt herring, salmon and stories. We would be walking down to the store and Jim would be working out in his shed - usually mending salmon nets since he had the rights to the wild salmon fishing around the coast. We would stop and say hello and before we knew it we would be in Jim's kitchen with a cup of tea, caught again in his web of Coigach lore.

He told a story about a ship that had been torpedoed off the coast during WWII, its cargo floating away on the tide. Some of that cargo was found by Murdo and Angus who were out fishing in the area some days later - a wooden crate bound with brass. The men were excited - they thought the contents must be valuable - and sure enough, when they pried the crate open it was full of money! Bundles of bills, consecutively numbered. Although they didn't recognize the bills, they thought they had made their fortune and took a sample to the bank in Ullapool. Unfortunately they were told that what they had was newly minted Nationalist Chinese currency - virtually worthless in Scotland. What they did with some of that money is a story told in our book - it did afford them some fun - but it was a fortune quickly found and lost. Sort of like our 401K's.