Day 1 was tour of a selection of some of the many Portsmouth museums, starting with the submarine museum which was fantastic, but also sobering seeing the names in memorial garden.
Will the ultimate explorer ticket you can visit all attractions for 12 months and also take the boat from HMS dolphin and the submarines across the the dockyards and on to the explosions museum.
Next up was one of the last surviving WW1 ships HMS M.33 with fascinating stories of what the crew had to endure. Then onto the busy, but brilliantly presented Marie Rose museum. With just enough time to catch the last boat trip to see the explosions museum before it closed for the day.
We had a great view of the Spinaker tower, lit up in the colours of the Ukraine flag, from Haslaar marina that evening as we got ready for a reasonably early departure and the first trip out of the UK to France.
It was a fairly bumpy trip so we were glad to arrive in Saint Vaast La Hougue just after the lock opened at 18:00 for a lovely evening and dinner in the village.
The next day after delicious bread and a wander around the village we did the 8km Sentier Vauban- St Vaast la Hougue giving a great tour of the port fortifications, beaches, oyster beds and town.
A dutch vessel trying to fix a leak in their hull between the tides.
As well as the great bakeries, butchers and fish mongers the Maison Gosselin provided us with souvenirs and essental cheese and saucisson sec.
We have a draft of 2.30m, which matched the description of the depth of the harbour, and the depth guage did go down to 0.0 whilst we were there but it didn’t feel like we actually touched the bottom.
We could easily have stayed longer but after 2 nights we still wanted to get the Alderney on this trip so headed off to a very slow start and gradually more bumpy trip, eventually giving up against the tides to spend the last hour motoring into Alderney.
We spend 2 rolley nights in the harbour at Alderney. Not very comfortable. But worth it to visit and walk round the island. The coast path is 10 km, we detoured back in land half way to have lunch in St Annes at the Blonde Hedgehog which was excellent. The coast path was beautiful, lots of Victorian forts, gull rock, a womble, plenty of interesting WW2 concrete structures, bunkers, towers and an anti tank wall (?) and sandy beaches, rocks and a close up view of the light house that we had made such slow progress towards the previous day. The napoleonic telegraph tower had a great museum explaining its history and signalling codes.
We had a beautiful sunset for the final evening. The trip back to Portland was good, very slow at first with sone unsuccessful fishing. We crossed the shipping channels with a good wind, making a steady 8 knots, with a couple of hails from the Cherbourg VTT, slightly confusingly suggesting we were on a collision course, although we were not in the separation zone at the time and safely passing to stern of large vessels each time, preferring to be closer to their stren than run the risk of being too close ahead of the next ship.
We did have the conversation about should we put a reef in, and that just thinking that means we should, but we didn’t … and regretted it later having to do it with a bit too much wind (a steady 25 + knots which was more than forecast) and waves. Going to try a new rule, wind > 20 knots = 1 reef, will we remember this for next time?
It’s always great to arrive back at Portland, the harbour means you always know there’s shelter to take the sails down and theres always plenty happening to watch and enjoy in the marina.
