‘Lady Emma  ’ Short Cruise August 28/Sept 1st  – report by Becky Goddard

Skipper: Bob Buchanan  . Crew: Becky Goddard  , Becca Hayward  , Hugh Hayward  , Kevin Lay  and Colin Evans 

We assembled on the Friday night at the Great Wall Chinese restaurant in Gosport for our next four day trip, again hoping for the weather conditions to go cross channel. Typical of our climate this summer the forecast was for very light winds from the south on Saturday and from the north on the Monday/Tuesday! No euros needed then! Instead we decided to go exploring the Isle of Wight after various ideas were bandied about e.g. ferry to France, taxi to Chichester or Brighton!

Saturday morning late we sailed very slowly over to Cowes – very little traffic about considering it was a bank holiday weekend.

Sunday we took the bus to Newport (Colin making all the appropriate noises for a bus driver) and took another bus to Ventnor. This is a lovely quiet old fashioned holiday town with a small beach and very steep roads to the seafront. Here we had lunch before catching the next bus to Shanklin then Sandown where we stopped again. This has a much bigger beach and a pier so we had to go on the funfair and the dodgems!

We picked up the next bus after a beer in the Castle pub on the road out of town. The idea was to stop at Bembridge and look for Seaview (a lunch stop for friends of ours who sail a bilge keeler out of Chichester). Seaview is not in the Pilot book even and seemed to be a narrow river – not much good for Lady Emma! Rain was threatening so we returned to Cowes via Newport and had a late supper on the boat (Colin decided that making all the bus noises was hard work so he wouldn’t be taking a driver’s job yet!) Our day out on a group ticket cost £5 each and all the buses were busy – well done IOW local authority!

Monday the sun came out so we sailed late and slow to Yarmouth where the marina was half empty – the Solent was almost deserted – it seemed as if everyone (except some power boats) had decided to cut their weekends down! We had dinner in the new Indian restaurant and had an early night ready for an early start next day to catch the best tide back to Gosport.

It took us nearly four and a half hours tootling along back to our berth and realised that although we had done 37 nautical miles on the boat we had probably covered over sixty miles on land!!