by S. Penoyre

After a weekend’s crewing for an expert and a couple of one night trips in our Enterprise on the Severn and in Chichester Harbour, I felt that a three night cruise in the Solent would be a good idea. Thus my crew Hugh MacBride and I arrived at my aunt’s house in Bosham one Saturday evening last July. Incidentally, choice of crew is particularly vital when you are inexperienced, and I feel that for short passages like these sailing ability is much less important than a good temper. The owner will probably want to do any tricky sailing himself anyway, but annoying accidents and mistakes are bound to occur and it can’t be much fun cruising with the mutual stress and bad language which seem so common in the less successful racing dinghies. So far I’ve been able to get crews whose helmsmanship and self control are better than mine, which is fine except that they may not come twice.

We had a very pleasant day sail on the Sunday, with little wind but good sunshine. We discovered a moderate leak at the back of the centreboard case, which was fixed with Bostick and string on returning to Bosham and gave no further trouble. On Monday morning the forecast was perfect — NE force 3. High water at Bosham was at nine, but we weren’t loaded up and under way until 9.40. The wind was light but soon increased to about force 3 southerly, and with the sun shining and the sea smooth conditions were ideal. We passed Horse Sand Fort at 12.45 and continued sailing up the Solent, eating our cold lunch. We were just getting ideas about Beaulieu when at about 3.30 by South Middle the wind died. We tried closer inshore and found a light headwind. Off Old Castle the foul tide was more noticeable, and off Cowes we had a strong tide and very fluky wind. At 5 p.m. when it was clear that we were about to be carried backwards through the shipping anchored in Cowes Roads for the second time, we anchored just clear (we hoped) of the Prohibited Area off Victoria Pier. The 4½ lb. Danforth on 100ft of ¾” nylon held nicely although the rope was none too long for the 50ft of water given on the chart. At 6.15 we saw the yachts anchored inshore start to swing although the tide was still east-going outside, so we paddled in and tacked close inshore in a light head wind. It was a glorious evening. We passed fairly close to the 12 metre Norsaga and exchanged waves with her helmsman. “The poetry of motion that is sailing” — beautiful. At about 8 p.m. we landed for the night round Gurnard Head in Thorness Bay — good landing on a sandy beach at high water, but it seems to dry a long way out at low water. Supper was our standard meal of tinned soup, steak and peas, fruit heated on our two meths stoves (3/6 each at Woolworths, nearly as fast as a primus, and foolproof). The sea was like a millpond and the red sun set into the haze. We unrolled our ex-RAF sleeping suits, inflated Lilo pillows, changed and turned in.

It was a fine night but with a heavy dew. I hadn’t used the waterproof suit cover and my bag got rather damp outside, although all right inside. One lesson learnt. A stream of shipping thumped up the Solent in the small hours. We got forecasts at 6.45 and 6.55 which were good, on the family’s transistor radio we were carrying sealed in a plastic bag inside a wooden box. We aired the sleeping bags while eating breakfast of porridge, baked beans and sausages. We were underway at 9, with a light westerly wind and bright sun, a perfect morning. We headed for Lymington, intending to spend the night at Yarmouth. However we realised when in the middle of the Solent that we had plenty of time, and so tacked in to look at Newtown. We sailed up to Shalfleet quay past the boats anchored in Shalfleet Lake — mostly small sailing cruisers with friendly people on board. The landing is good at half tide or more, but one may have difficulty reaching the quay at low water. Excellent local beer is available at the pub in the village, ten minutes walk from the quay. The place is National Trust, there are no ice cream sellers etc., and if there are nicer anchorages in the Solent I’d be glad to hear about them.

We left about 11.30 by which time the tide was running strongly to the west and the wind had increased to force 4 south-westerly. We made the elementary mistake of not putting on PVCs until the spray started to come over, by when we had our hands too full to do so, so we got rather wet, particularly Hugh who was crewing. However the trip across to Lymington was probably the fastest sail of the cruise and the strong sun offset the dampness. We planed into Lymington and landed at the seaward side of the Yacht Club, the conspicuous white building on the port side entering. We ate our lunch ashore and dried out before pressganging two men launching another dinghy to help us carry the Enterprise down the fine new hard. We then discovered that this is some 6 ft. too short for low water use. A minor circus followed, in which Hugh put a foot off the hard and sank up to his knee in mud, filling his rubber boot in the process. When he had cleaned up and run out of expletives we combined with two other people also with an Enterprise to launch both boats and got them off to the landing stage steps, using anchor rope and paddle. A muddy but otherwise successful manoeuvre, and we picked their brains about the best camping spot in Yarmouth.

We left at 3.30 with full main but no jib. A fairly near miss with a barge occurred on the way out, as we got in irons without the jib to help her about, but Hugh extracted us very neatly. Once clear of the entrance with plenty of room to leeward we reefed to the lowest batten, for practise and to have a restful crossing rather than because it was strictly necessary, the sea having become less lumpy with the change of tide and the wind being south-west force four or five. We could not lie to Yarmouth with the east-going tide, so had to tack up the island shore after crossing. Entering Yarmouth was a bit tricky as we were aiming for a sandy beach on the starboard side of the channel just to seaward of the bridge. We hoisted the jib after entering and had to tack up the lines of moored boats, nearly becoming involved with a large motor yacht manoeuvring in the harbour. However by waiting until she had got clear Hugh made our beach without touching anything or paddling, which is always satisfying. We ran the boat up above high water mark with the rollers, draped our wet clothes about the rigging, and walked 100 yards to the beach for a swim. After dressing we walked round to the town, the only snag of our landing spot being that although within a stone’s throw of the bridge one has a ten minute walk along the beach and back along the road to reach it, owing to a small creek. After Hugh’s experience at Lymington we felt that attempts to cross this were unwise. We were just in time to go round the Castle (closing 7 p.m.) where the view from the battlements is worth the 6d. charged for admission, but we knew too little about it to get much out of the rest. We had supper at the ‘Harbour Lights’ cafe, an adequate meal and somewhere where scruffy dinghy sailors are not in the least out of place among the holidaymakers. After supper we walked along the beach to find out what the moderate westerly wind was doing to the sea off Hurst. We couldn’t see much but it did not look too nice. We turned in on the dunes in the lee of some bushes.

The night was dry although cloudy at times, and the morning forecasts were bad — 4 to 5 westerly, occasionally 6 later. Clearly this was too much for us to go out of the Solent, so we decided to sail back east. As the tide would not be favourable until 3.30 we did some shopping in Yarmouth and went by bus to Alum Bay. We wandered along the foot of the cliffs here, which are extremely impressive. Hundreds of feet of chalk, each inch the result of many years and containing the remains of countless creatures. Can the actions of one creature even as complicated as I am, living for a mere seventy years, have any significance? And those ant-like figures round the ‘sand-hut’ as one looks down from the Needles — another fraction of an inch in some future strata, or the inheritors of the Kingdom of God? When one lies looking up at the night sky, knowing that for each visible star there are hundreds more invisible to the naked eye in this galaxy alone, and that similar galaxies extend as far as our probing radio and optical instruments can reach, the idea of a God interested in us as individuals is hard to accept. And then one sees a great play or reads a poem or falls in love and the materialistic view seems no more satisfactory than the religious. Omar or Christ? ‘One thing at least is certain, this life flies’.

We left Yarmouth at about 3.30, expecting a rough trip, the wind being force 5-6 westerly. Jib only, PVCs and, of course, life jackets as usual. For a while after clearing the pier all went well, but the seas soon became rather alarming, short, steep, and sometimes breaking. We were torn between the conflicting theories of ‘get out into deep water in the middle’ (where swamping might lead to an undignified and expensive rescue), and ‘get close in to the shore’ (where we could get ashore if swamped but where the sea looked worse, if anything). We were going very fast, planing on the waves, and she was rather hard to keep straight. Also we seemed to be in danger of being pooped by any wave, but to sit forward was presumably asking to broach-to. We went round the Hamstead Ledge buoy, but the sea seemed to be particularly bad here and we decided to quit and go into Newtown. Here I made the worst error of judgement of the cruise, which resulted in our failing to reach the gravel bank to windward of the entrance and being blown across to the lee shore thirty yards away. We got the anchor over in the middle, but it dragged on the hard bottom when we tried to pull her off to it. We had to lower the mast, an easy manoeuvre in calm water, before we could paddle across to the windward bank where we landed for food and drink and to consider. The problem was to decide how wise it would be to continue eastwards i.e. how near to swamping we had been. It had looked nasty but in fact we had not shipped a drop of water. On the other hand, it only needed one wave properly on board to leave us on a waterlogged hull with no sheltered landing before Cowes and all our gear soaked. The matter was decided when we realised that if Thursday was possible we could easily sail to Chichester in one day, while if impossible the boat would have to be left on the island in any case, and whether at Newtown or Wootton didn’t make much difference. We therefore decided to spend the night at Shalfleet. Not liking the idea of tacking up a narrow channel with a lee shore under much reduced sail, I decided to tow the dinghy along the windward bank. This was all right while the bottom remained hard, but it wasn’t for long and we were soon forced to progress by throwing the anchor and hauling up to it, a messy and dangerous method. With the wind decreasing and the tide rising we soon raised the mast and deep reefed mainsail and sailed up to the quay, having to paddle the last twenty yards for lack of water. We were greeted on the quay by a single handed dinghy cruiser, George Baveystock, from Shoreham. We were put to shame by the disgusting state of ourselves (unshaven) and our boat (covered with mud), but both crews were glad to have company and we combined for supper in the camp site about 100 yards from the quay. This site is a grass patch surrounded by hedges, containing two wooden huts and with plenty of room for tents, on the right of the path along the side of the creek. It is apparently ‘official’ in some way — use of an earth closet is provided, and I understood George to say that 3/- a night may be collected, although it wasn’t from us. The only snag of this ideal place is biting insects, which bothered us a bit. We walked up to the local with George and then turned in, as we were aiming at an early start to make the most of the tide.

The wind had dropped almost completely, but we had a couple of light showers in the night. The waterproof outers were satisfactory except that the rain made quite a noise on the hoods, and clearly for prolonged rain a tent is advisable. We got up at 5.30 and fed on porridge and baked beans and sausages again, not having had time to rig up an egg box before the trip. We had rolled the boat ashore as she doesn’t lie well moored, and had rather a ‘Gadarene swine’ launch down a steep ramp. However all was well. We left at 7.40 sailing independently as the Enterprise should have been faster than George’s solider dinghy, although he was heading for Chichester too on his way back to Shoreham. The wind was light westerly, which increased slightly as the morning wore on but never to more than a full sail breeze. The original plan had been to wait at Wootton for the evening tide, but we were going so well we decided to carry on and do it in one hop. We passed rather too close to the Langstone Fairway buoy and altered course seawards to give the West Pole sand a wider berth than was strictly necessary, as the sun had come out and we were enjoying the perfect sailing weather. We landed by Hayling Island sailing club at 12.15, where we lunched before going up to Bosham. We had had beginner’s luck with the weather, and it had been a very pleasant trip.