I awake feeling foolish. It is early morning, and I pop from a dreamless sleep unspoiled by gale-tossed seas, my worst fears unwarranted. I don multiple synthetic layers and climb up to a rear deck that, unlike the side decks, is open to passengers. This may be because it is more sheltered, but is more likely a function of the need to provide somewhere for smokers to huddle and shiver.

Whatever storms failed to stir me from slumber are consigned to meteorological history, and the Hrossey powers along the eastern side of Shetland’s largest island, confusingly called Mainland. (There is no such confusion in Shetland, where locals never refer to mainland Scotland as mainland anything. Instead it is simply known as ‘south’ -- or, more accurately, ‘sooth’.)

One hour out from Lerwick, the moon is a canted melon slice in an azure sky sparingly dusted with cirrus. A bone-brittling southerly pursues us parallel to the Mainland coastline, which from a few kilometres away is a jagged wave of black rock washed soapy white by the invading swell. As I stand tipping slowly towards hypothermia, the island appears low-lying, seldom reaching more than about thirty metres above the churning sea. Its late September tones offer barely a hint at the green of a summer already despatched to memory, and presage the inevitability of a long winter.

I lean on a metal hand rail as chilled as the inside of a meat locker, and face the numbing draught. Straight ahead, peering from the post-dawn haze is a ramped island like a colossal door wedge rising to a near-vertical cliff at its seaward edge. West of the wedge’s thin end soars the shoe-box rectangular cliff-face of another island, which I think is Bressay. I sweep the seas with my binoculars. Not a single other vessel graces the jagged horizon.

Shetland tourism industry officials intent on drawing travel junkies like me should tear up the glossy brochures filled with contrived photographs of studiously fashionable couples running hand in hand through Atlantic surf. Instead, they should pump out a million copies of a booklet already sold by the Shetland Islands Council. It is called Shetland in Statistics, and every statistic within it sends up another alluring beacon to travel-lovers.

Of Shetland’s one hundred-plus islands, only fifteen are inhabited, and those by a total of just under 22,000 souls.

There are twelve puffins and eighteen sheep to every human resident.

Shetland’s combined coastline is 1,460 kilometres, roughly the distance from London to Rome, or Chicago to New Orleans. An astonishing 400 kilometres of this is made up of cliffs, including the highest in occupied Britain -- over 370 metres of vertical rock on the remote isle of Foula.

It is closer to the Arctic Circle (640 kilometres) than to London (965 kilometres), and closer still to Bergen, Norway (380 kilometres).

Sitting at a latitude equal to that of Anchorage, Alaska, its 1,470 square kilometres are peppered with over seven thousand recorded archaeological sites, some of which pre-date the Pyramids of Giza by fifteen hundred years.

Eight hundred species of flowering plants are rained upon two hundred and sixty-nine days a year, yet Shetland’s total annual rainfall is similar to that of Devon -- a thousand kilometres away on the ‘English Riviera’.

Number of non-business visitors in 2000: 19,625.

Number of (non-business) British visitors to Spain in the same year: 10.7 million. (Last number sourced on the Internet.)

Until the late 1980s, Shetland was not only all-but missing from British consciousness, it was entirely absent from television weather bulletins -- literally off the map. In some ways, it might as well still be.

Travel excites me. Any travel. Almost thirty itinerant years have implanted in me a need for exploration that dishes up fun, escape, adventure and even the odd scrap of professional reward. This trip is devised to deliver all of the above by spending over a month wandering a group of islands whose place in history pours scorn on its perceived remoteness. An archipelago whose geographical isolation has surely contributed to what it is today, an offshoot mini-society with independence in its veins and thousands of years of history forever hovering in its near-past.

Ahead of me stretch a few autumnal weeks, set aside to do what I love best. My goals are entirely non-specific. There is no quest to cover every mile of road or visit every community, and I suffer no pressing time restrictions. No kitchen appliances feature in my luggage, and I harbour no ambition to completely encircle every coastline or tick off every possible destination on any list, because there are no lists made up for this trip. My uncomplicated goal is to travel wherever the notion takes me, to explore as many islands as is practicable and encounter as many Shetlanders as I cross paths with. Along the way, I will surely learn something about a prosperous northern community that sits on the outer fringes, not only of British, but of European consciousness.

See also our story: 21st century Shetland travelogue

'Between Weathers' is available from www.amazon.co.uk as of 15 May.
Ron McMillan will sign copies of his book in the Shetland Times bookshop on 7 June. He and Bob Davidson of Sandstone Press will also be present at the Classic Motor Show, in Lerwick, that weekend.