On a Sunday in July 2024 a club crew took Concorde down the Solent to Gosport and back. A week in Brittany makes the better photographs, but a day like this one is what most of the club's sailing actually looks like. Here is what they saw on one day sail. Cross-Solent ferries and the hovercraft. The aircraft carrier Prince of Wales, alongside under repair. Blade runners carrying their cargoes of wind turbine foils. The Steamship Shieldhall under way. A fleet of J70s racing. And cruise liners leaving Southampton docks on the evening tide. The Solent is a working waterway with a racing circuit laid over the top of it, and on a clear Sunday you get all of it at once. The shape of such a day is much the same whichever way the wind sits. You arrive at the boat, stow a bag and help get her ready, which is where a good deal of the learning happens. Somebody has already planned the day around the tide. By mid-morning you are out of the river and deciding, as a crew, where lunch is going to be: Osborne Bay or Thorness in summer, often with a swim off the back of the boat, Newtown Creek when it is quiet, Gosport and back when the wind is in the east. Nobody is a passenger unless they want to be. You can take the helm, trim a sail, work the foredeck, or sit in the cockpit with a cup of tea and watch how it is done. The skipper is qualified and has sailed the boat plenty. The rest of the crew will range from a great deal of experience to none at all. Then home up the river, past the swans on the pontoon, and quite often into the Gaff Rigger at the marina afterwards. That is the whole of it. No boat to own, no berth to pay for, no crew to find. You sign up for the trips you like the look of, you pay the day rate, and you go sailing.
Jane Wiggins
Jane WigginsMore photos
