May 2015 - Chichester Rally

Chichester Rally May 2015 

Chichester is not the obvious Rally to go to if you live in Glasgow, however it did lie on the way to France and the Semaine de Gulf du Morbihan where we planned to sail early in May. 

As things turned out although we launched Tra Bhui we did not actually sail anywhere, so this report is not about sailing, but really about a weekend spent in Chichester. 

Thursday 1st 

“Flying Solo” I left Lenzie at 15.45hrs heading south to Southampton where I had booked a room at the Macdonald Botley Park Hotel. The drive was really non-eventful. Recent adjustments to the trailer appeared to have overcorrected the excessive nose weight problem to the extent that Tra Bhui started to develop a mind of her own at 56 mph travelling downhill. A further adjustment to correct this is obviously required. 

After stops at Westmoreland for dinner and at Cherwell Valley just south of Birmingham I arrived at the hotel just before 01.00 hrs. on the Friday morning. 

Friday 2nd 

Waking at 08.00 hrs. I was perfectly on time to meet Kathleen’s flight at 08.30 hrs., however BMI had pulled out all the stops and 10 minutes before I arrived at the airport, I received a call from Kathleen wondering where I was. As Kathleen is again flying with BMI when she flies down to Rennes to meet me next week, I will not make the mistake of assuming that the airline will adhere to its scheduled arrival times again! 

Arriving at the Marina

Having picked Kathleen up we headed towards Chichester Marina some 40 minutes away. The Marina was easy to find and once we had booked a berth at the marina office and arranged launching and recovery we headed to the Boat House Cafe for a slightly belated breakfast before doing anything else. 

In the words of Premier Marinas, the company that owns and operates Chichester Marina – “Chichester Marina is located at the eastern end of Chichester Harbour, a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty that offers a myriad of quiet anchorages to discover and easy access to the popular cruising grounds of the Solent. Family friendly and ideal for boaters of all abilities, the harbour and the marina within it, is perfect for nature and bird watching, walking in the countryside, or just soaking up the ambiance whilst relaxing aboard a boat. 

A locked marina, with over 1,000 berths, two boat hoists, a slipway and ample boat storage ashore, Chichester Marina is actually one of the UK’s largest marinas but because the marina is immersed in stunning scenery and its buildings are architecturally low key, it has a marked air of peace and tranquility. “ 

This translates as a marina filled with many, many boats some of which obviously never venture out of it. It is set in very pretty countryside but the numerous creeks and inlets around it are packed with boats at anchor. Very different to the west coast of Scotland that we are used to. 

The slipway was on the opposite side of the marina from the office and the cafe so after a very good breakfast I paid our bill (including an extra pot of tea to be served later) and left Kathleen to the papers while I trailed Tra Bhui around to the slipway. 

One of my recent projects was to fit a tabernacle to Tra Bhui. The mast on a Gig is heavy enough, but the addition of roller reefing and masthead instruments took it into the “do not try this alone!” category. The tabernacle which effectively provides as hinge at the bottom of the mast makes erection or “stepping” much easier and safer (see Tra Bhui Projects). 

As the mast had not yet been erected on the tabernacle it was a relief to find that it not only went up easily, but if fitted perfectly. 

While I was busy rigging Tra Bhui, a number of other Drascombe owners stopped by to talk. It was good to catch up with Douglas Hopwood with whom we had sailed during the Viking Cruise in 2014. It was also good to meet other owners some of whom I had corresponded with by e-mail in the past. 

I had to spend some time refitting all of the running rigging which had been removed before the winter before Tra Bhui was ready to launch. Just as I was finishing loading the kit that we did not require back into the car, Kathleen arrived, obviously having read all available newspapers and drunk her fill of tea. 

Launching was slightly complicated by Tra Bhui’s center board having loosened itself during the journey allowing it to sit down on the trailer rollers. As we tried to launch Tra Bhui, she slipped easily at first down the trailer before coming to a stop. Those on the pontoon opposite the stern shouted that she was hitting the bottom. After moving the trailer back twice I realized after some helpful prompting that the center board was actually the problem. I should have spotted this as the problem myself! 

Another winter project had been to change the outboard from remote control to tiller control. This made manoeuvring Tra Bhui much easier as the outboard can now be turned to give direction. Soon we were in berth O13 were I erected the tent while Kathleen went for a walk. Nearly an hour and a half later and an hour and fifteen minutes after I had erected the tent, Kathleen returned from her walk allowing us to make plans for the remainder of the day. 

As the Rally had no plans to sail, we decided to walk into Chichester following the Salterns Way. The term Salterns is associated with the making of salt. Chichester Marina had been created by deepening former salt ponds that were on the site. The walk took us probably an hour and a half and followed a fairly convoluted route around field boundaries. At one point we stopped to read a very informative notice board about the use of nearby fields as an airfield during the Second World War. 

Chichester Cathedral - Old Tower

Reaching Chichester we were in need of a coffee, conscious that it was by now 16.30hrs and it being England everything would be shutting, we considered ourselves fortunate to come across the coffee shop at Chichester Cathedral. The shop was a new build off one of the cloisters. While the architecture was good the coffee was not, still it was a nice stop. 

Chichester was holding an Open Studio weekend in the form of an Art Trail. We had seen a number of signs advertising it during our walk, but it was too late in the day to go into any of the venues. Hopefully we would have time to do so over the weekend.

We wandered the city center for a little while before setting off back to the marina this time following the banks of the Chichester canal. The Chichester Canal is / was a navigable canal in England. It originally ran 4.5 miles (7.2 km) from the sea at Birdham Chichester Harbour (Chichester Marina) to Chichester through two locks. The canal (originally part of the Portsmouth and Arundel Canal) was opened in 1822 having taken three years to build. When completed the canal could take ships of up to 100 tons. Dimensions were limited to 85 feet (26 m) long 18 feet (5.5 m) wide and a draft of up to 7 feet (2.1 m). The canal was used to transport goods from the sea to Chichester. 

We had arranged to meet one of my school friends and his wife at the Boat House Cafe for dinner. Arriving back at the marina at 18.45 hrs. we just had time to shower and change before it was time to meet them. We had a very pleasant evening catching up with friends, before retiring to Tra Bhui for the night. 

Saturday 3rd 

The weather forecast for Saturday was not promising with high winds forecast for later in the day. The morning briefing was held at the slipway and the plans for the day discussed. The general plan appeared to be to generally head down towards Hayling island making the most of the outgoing tide, stop somewhere for lunch and then overnight at anchor. Coming back into the marina later on in the afternoon would mean sailing or motoring against both the tide and wind. 

In deciding what we were going to do we needed to consider the fact that we planned to haul Tra Bhui early on the Sunday afternoon as Kathleen had a flight to catch and I had a ferry to get so we wanted to make sure that we were back in the marina in plenty of time. Another consideration was the balance between a potentially wet and windy night at anchor as opposed to a sheltered night in the marina where we had showers and toilets. The downside to not having a cabin is that while the tent on Tra Bhui is warm and dry it is not the same as having a cabin as everything has to be stowed and re-stowed each time we set it up and precludes us from really having any onboard toilet facilities (last year we carried a portaloo, but this was not really practical). 

In the end we decided that exploring the local area by foot was probably our best option as given the forecast and our desire to be back in the marina by nightfall. This possibly defeated the point of coming down to the Rally, but with the potential to sail over the next two weeks it seemed a reasonable decision at the time. 

As we were not imminently about to set sail we walked around to the Boat House Cafe for coffee and bacon rolls after which wandered around the marina on our way back to Tra Bhui. Given that we were not sailing we planned to make the most of the day so after tidying up we set out in the car to go to the The Apuldram Centre which we had walked past during our walk into Chichester on Friday afternoon. 

The Apuldram Centre is a charity run center which gives work and training to people with learning difficulties. The house and former farm buildings host a small café which advertises home baking. It had been shut when we walked past it on Friday so we thought that it would be a nice place to go for lunch. 

Finding a window seat in the café we ordered a sandwich and a salad. When they came we asked for coffee only to be told that the café was now shut and they were closing up. They might have mentioned this when we ordered! 

After lunch we headed to Chichester for a longer look around as we had been pushed for time on the Friday. After stopping for coffee at a small café just off the main street we found our way to the “Bishop’s Palace Gardens” at the 900 year old Chichester Cathedral, the gardens were great and well worth a visit. 

Walking around some of the side streets of Chichester we saw more of the signs advertising the Art Trail, part of Chichester’s Open Studio weekend. One of the venues we passed was open so we went in to have a look. The venue was simply the front room of someone’s small terraced house. On display were a number of pieces of jewelry, none of which really stood out as being great. The fact that we were in someone’s front room felt a bit odd as the jewelry was simply laid out on a couple of small tables with all the other contents of the room left in their normal positions. We quickly left before we got drawn into the artist who was obviously keen to talk to any visitors.

Having seen a reasonable amount of Chichester we drove to Bosham a coastal village with it’s own small harbor which lies within the area termed as Chichester Harbour. 

The village can trace it’s history back to Roman times and is listed in the Doomsday Book as one of the wealthiest manors in England. Parking in the village car park we went for a wander around the town. The road around the bay floods each high tide and there are numerous signs warning people not to park on it. As the tide was out we walked around the bay enjoying the countryside and looking at the eclectic mixture of houses that had been built along the roadside. The houses ranged from the very old to the very modern, build by people who obviously had a large budget. Again we were struck by just how many boats there were at anchor and how far people must have to go to get open water that is not restricted by anchored vessels. 

Back at the marina we found that a few of Drascombes had come back in after their day’s sailing. We were planning on eating at the Boat House Cafe so we invited Douglas Hopwood and Ian Cowie to join us there for a drink afterwards. 

Sunday 4th 

After a leisurely start to the day, I took the tent down and packed things away while Kathleen went off to the showers. Most of the other boats returned to the marina as I was taking the tent down having spent the night at anchor elsewhere. By the accounts we heard the night had been a bit rough which made us glad we had stayed where we were. On Kathleen’s return (an hour or so later!) we motored across to the slipway and hauled Tra Bhui out of the water. As I winched her onto her trailer I heard the sound of snapping fabric in the winch strap, really not what I wanted to hear when we were about to take Tra Bhui over to Europe for the summer as it would have to be replaced. 

After everything was stowed away and tied down we parked the car up and went for a walk towards Itchenor via Birdham Pool.

Coming across more Art Trail signs we were tempted into the studio of an artist. The studio was built on to the side of his house which at least was better than the venue we had visited yesterday which was someone’s front room. The artist was a former architect and his pictures were very good, quite precise but good all the same. On talking to him it turned out that he had retired early, was a keen sailor and still did commissions for fellow architects to illustrate buildings and developments for planning submissions. This explained why his drawings were so precise.

At Birdam Pool we went into another exhibition in a building next to a boatyard. This time the exhibition was by a collection of local artists and reflected a number of different drawing and painting styles. While 90 % of the paintings and drawings on show while good in their own right but not to our taste, there were a few that we did like and two that we actually would have bought had someone with exceedingly good taste not beaten us to it!

Outside the gallery I discovered a fantastic bit of modern history – a boat turntable. The turntable had been built by the Royal Navy at the top of the adjacent slipway during (we were told by one of the artists) the Second World War. The turntable allowed the yard to recover and store boats on their launch cradles as they could be turned in their own length and directed down the rail tracks that lead to a number of sheds in the boatyard. We were told that plans had been submitted to develop the boatyard as flats. It would be a shame if this unique piece of modern history was lost.

Boat Turntable - only one in UK?

Builders Plaque

As usual, all to soon our weekend was over and we headed back to the airport where I dropped Kathleen off in plenty of time to catch Flybe’s 20.05 hrs. flight No 898 back to Glasgow. From the airport I headed towards Portsmouth and the Brittany Ferries Terminal in order to catch the overnight ferry to Caen which left Portsmouth at 22.45 hrs.