Passage 49, Portsmouth to Chichester
Before leaving, I had one last museum to check out, The Royal Navy Submarine Museum. This was in Gosport very close to my marina so I walked over for it's 10am opening. They have 3 subs here, HMS Alliance is a WW2 hunter-killer, Holland 1 - the Royal Navy's first submarine and X24 a mini sub. All fascinating of course. I really want to see a modern nuclear sub, though. They don't exhibit those.
To sum up, the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard and its contents is a tremendous day's learning. Highly recommended.
I set off at noon under a cloudless sky. Truth be told I had every intention of going to Littlehampton but there was very little wind and I was going so slowly I downgraded my expectations and diverted to Chichester. I could have motored but I'm determined to keep the motoring to the bare minimum.
Being Sunday and (appropriately) sunny, there were loads of boats out and it was particularly busy coming out of Portsmouth with commercial and pleasure boats coming in and going out at the same time. I had to wait for a small container ship to pass before heading East and I even altered course a tad to prevent a collision with one of Her Majesty's battle ships.
As soon as I'd decided that Littlehampton was a no-goer I headed for Chichester. Actually, I headed for a spot on the coast well before Chichester as the tide was kindly doing the East portion of my journey. I just had to point the boat North to go North-East. Such was the leisurely pace of my sail, I crabbed my way into Chichester. The wind did, in fact, pick up a bit after a while so it wasn't that bad and once in Chichester harbour I sailed around a bit to get a good look around.
Chichester harbour is pretty much exclusively populated with pleasure boats (these days) and there were loads of sailing boats, motor boats and dinghies all over the place. It's a very attractive place. I ended up anchoring at the top of Thorney channel, about 4 miles in from the entrance. It was a lovely anchorage and a lovely evening as the day had remained clear and the sun shone to the last. It felt good to have a rest from the commercialism of those big marinas in the Solent. Peace and quite.
Summary
A relaxing, slow, peaceful sail with force 2 winds in full sunshine. The passage was 18 miles and took well over 4 hours. Somewhat inefficient as it could have been done in 10 miles, but I was in no hurry.