'Sorry," I cried, jumping the Edinburgh garage queue. "Got a cruise ship to catch." Three hours later, watching a black snub-prow approach along Argyll's Crinan canal, I felt a mild pang of remorse: with its scarlet smokestack and jaunty caramel superstructure, the Vic 32 looked more like a fairground ride than the QE2.
Through the wheelhouse window, posters shrieked, in large type, "Helicopter Rescue and Abandon Ship". The brass was polished, though, and the paint fresh, so, reasoning that the crew were unlikely to waste energy on anything they expected to plunge to the bottom, I stepped on board.
The Vic 32 is the last functioning example of the dumpy steamboats that flitted chiefly around the west coast of Scotland between the 1870s and 1960s. Nick Walker and his wife Rachel rescued it from dereliction in 1975 and, after a two-year restoration programme, sailed it up to Crinan on Argyll's Atlantic coast, from where they now run a series of summer cruises.
I was afraid that my time on board would be divided between marine bores and chronic seasickness - the marque has no keel so they could be beached at low tide for unloading - but, in fact, I disembarked thoroughly refreshed and entertained.
The puffers, as these vessels were called - though for obscure technical reasons Vic 32 does not puff - already have their Homer. Almost a century ago, Scottish writer Neil Munro based a series of brilliant short stories, later televised, on the "high jenks" of a fictional puffer crew captained by the eponymous Para Handy.
Mr Walker, a rhubarb-cheeked, renegade Old Harrovian dressed in corduroys and hand-knitted woollens, like a Scandinavian fairground attendant, attributes much of his operation's success to the enduring popularity of Mr Munro's tales. "Many passengers weep when they leave," he claimed.
Days on the Vic 32 are divided between studying the stupendous west coast scenery and studying the other passengers with whom one lives for a week in a space the size of a caravan.
I was directed down to one of six two-berth cabins plumbed into the base of the former cargo hold that are just large enough to be licensed for stride-jumping. One floor above, the shadowy saloon had the congenial feel of a bordello designed by William Morris, with a piano, a steam-driven record player, a wood-burning stove and a table where the customers dined, or played cards, by candlelight.
Unlike Munro's crew, whose diet consisted of herring and pilfered farm animals, we dined on shrimp and mackerel complemented by Mediterranean vegetables. The cooks were Jane the Cake, from Sussex, and Kirsty, from Liverpool, who had come north to learn commercial diving.
At supper, I sat next to Richard, a laconic, commercial printer from Nottingham with hooded eyelids and a wing commander's moustache. His girlfriend had refused, for climatic reasons, to join him on the Scottish high seas. Conversely, Joan and Ronnie from Northern Ireland had shared voyages on the Vic 32 every year bar one since 1990.
Our itinerary was based on the Clyde estuary and Loch Fyne, a sea-loch slipped like a crooked dagger under the ribs of western Scotland. At Crarae, north of Lochgilphead, five of us rowed ashore to inspect the famous Himalayan garden and found its owner, Sir Ilay Campbell, sitting mournfully like Robinson Crusoe in a deserted visitor centre, chalking a notice for non-existent tourists scared off by petrol prices and the high pound. "Time has caught up with us," sighed Sir Ilay, whose grandmother put in the first magnificent azaleas and rhododendons, and whose hopes were resting on a £3m National Trust For Scotland rescue package.
Rolling back down the loch, we passed the grey bulk of Minard Castle from where a German-sympathising maid once spied for the Luftwaffe and was shot for her pains in the Tower of London. The region's isolation obviously fosters a rebellious streak. In 1940, the brilliant Argyll poet and nationalist George MacDougall Hay defied conscription and hid out in the mountains above Minard for eight months before being captured, disconsolately, by a Special Branch man wearing "an immaculate blue lounge suit".
Between the lochside and a rusty miniature railway line, a small cairn set in heather and rhododendrons honours John Smith, the late Labour party leader, "native of Argyll and son of Ardrishaig". Argyll, however, does not send a single Labourrepresentative to either the London or Edinburgh parliaments.
Hay served on Loch Fyne fishing boats between his Oxford terms, and his poems are not recommended reading for nervous seafarers: "We glimpse the crouching thundering forelands/That bare their fangs there, foaming white ... " But the Vic 32 butted comfortably over the knotted water. Alan, a bow-legged Stockport cranedriver with fingers as thick as parsnips, steered us through salty mist across Kilbrannan Sound, which runs between the Kintyre peninsula and Arran.
The on-board entertainment had a pragmatic quality. Walker, who once ran a boatyard in Uxbridge, unfurled charts and gave navigation lessons in the wheelhouse. The adventurous could slither down to the engine room where Keith, a bearded New Zealander, taught stoking. Standing by the open furnace door was like being mugged repeatedly with a hot sandbag; the trick was to bend your knees and flick the shovel over the embers without singeing your nose or tumbling backwards into the clanking pistons. Good fun, nonetheless. The evenings were spent reading Para Handy by the stove or drinking in cheerful pubs.
On my last night, we puffed into Tarbert, a pretty harbour clutched by rock and chiselled Victorian shopfronts, and overhung by the ivied debris of Robert the Bruce's castle. "Too good to be true," murmured Richard as the Vic 32 nuzzled up to a fishing boat which had a "For Sale" sign creaking from a halyard. Two motoring holidaymakers in daffodil-yellow anoraks peered enviously down at our marine anachronism.
On their advice, I wandered out to the headland and found a beach shimmering with pink and honey scallop shells drifting across the shingle on their rims, like fossilised petals. Offshore, Loch Fyne glistened like an indigo ice sheet. No cruise ship passenger ever saw anything half as beautiful.
Way to go
Getting there: Virgin Trains (08457 222333, virgintrains.co.uk) runs London Euston-Glasgow from £29 return. Scottish Citylink (08705 505050, citylink.co.uk) runs Glasgow-Lochgilphead from £9.30 return.
Cruises: Rachel and Nick Walker, The Change House, Crinan Ferry, Lochgilphead, Argyll PA 31 8QH. (01546 5102322) offer a programme of three different five-day voyages on the Vic 3 between April and September. The price is £475pp including all meals, bed linen and voluntary crew experience.
