One of our first ‘new’ destinations to explore on leaving the PYRA team behind was Chichester Harbour. We wanted to practice anchoring and living ‘on the hook’. We left Folly Inn on the River Medina on a lovely sunny day on 13 September – but with no wind we ended up motoring all the way.
The tide was quite low as we entered Chichester Harbour at the best time according to the pilot guide and slowly explored the estuary where draught allowed, on the way in to find the anchorages .. however, we quickly realised that the anchoring spots were quite small, and the channel quite narrow, and the tidal range quite high so we decided to pick up a mooring bouy instead!!
The buoy was right by Itchenor Harbour office, but our chosen buoy had a problem in that the strop was wrapped under the buoy. There weren’t any others available and so we called the Harbour Master to help, and with a lot of wriggling the strop, from his tender and from our deck we finally got it free and could moor up properly!
We realised that maybe we weren’t ready for anchorages yet, and came up with a list of Boat “attachment” / sleeping levels to work our way through. It included the below and we were happy to get to number 3!:
1 – Marina (very familiar to us)
2 – Mid river pontoon (as at Folly Inn the night before)
3 – Mooring buoy (reliability trusted / insured, with enough space to swing – like at Ichenor!!)
4 – Anchor
4.1 – big space without much traffic (see later post on Studland Bay)
4.2 – small space without much traffic (yet to get to this stage at time of writing!)
4.3 – small space lots of traffic
5 – Underway
6 – Hove to
Having got safely secured, we got the dinghy out easily (following the practice at Folly) and decided to go ashore and explore. We couldn’t get any wifi from the boat but found a lovely pub called the Ship Inn with excellent wifi – and amazing food, beer and wine too.
The next day we decided to take the dinghy further and motored up to Bosham – but we discovered that the outboard wasn’t very reliable as it kept on stalling. Jenni quickly learnt to duck whilst Chris was restarting it – else get an unintentional whack in the mouth!
We made it eventually and tied up in low water at Bosham and chatted to the Harbour Master who said we could stay for no charge, and had a lovely walk and stop at the cafe through the town. On leaving we did hit the shallows a little but got ourselves off and carried on – with the engine continuing to stall until it gave up for good! Chris got the oars out and rowed a good mile back to Yanula Blue, against the tide!! What a workout!!
We realised we needed a new outboard as ours had actually come off our previous boat Sansovino, so decided to stay on the mooring buoy as knew we would have to row everywhere. It was a perfect place for us and we actually ended up on the buoy for 6 days as it was so perfect … and also the cheapest place we had found on the South Coast!!
We didn’t see a rush to leave and used the time to fully explore this beautiful area with long walks and a bus trip to Chichester itself. Jenni’s cousin Ruth also came to visit in the simply perfect weather. We saw dolphins swimming through the harbour following the most bizarre ‘spin’ biking ferry and were able to eat on deck and watch the stars in the clear skies.
We spent the time to discuss the outboard options and wanted to research an electric outboard, so decided the next port should be for the Southampton Boat Show. We had been asked if we wanted to go with some friends, and some other good friends had offered us their tickets FOC, so we targeted Hamble as the best place to stay and with decent transport links to Southampton.
We sadly left Itchenor on 19 September to head to Hamble when the tide allowed – it was a little fruity making the way out, but we were in company with all the other boats leaving at this particular time. We raced – and won – against a lovely Hallberg Rassy and had a good sail up to Port of Hamble.
On the way in to Hamble we filled up with fuel and then had a very tricky entry to our berth in the fast flowing tide, which caught us a little offguard, but eventually got in safely to our next home for the next few days.
