We were ready and willing to go, waiting by Weymouth Town Bridge for the first opening of the day at 8am. Today we crossed over Lyme Bay, the furthest we’ve reached so far on our journey this summer. We’re going into the west!
We motor sailed up along the Isle of Portland, as we wanted to get to the Bill by 9am to avoid too much tide against us. Turning into Lyme Bay we had no wind so ended up keeping the engine on for another hour, but after that we sailed almost the whole way. We set the auto-pilot to follow the wind as we just needed to sail as close as possible wherever it was coming from! We got to our chosen anchoring spot Fishcombe Cove, just off Brixham as the light was beginning to shift. 65 miles, 11.5 hours, average speed 6.5 knots.
Our journey took us near the coast for the first part of the journey, and we followed the whole 18 miles of Chesil Beach from Portland to West Bay. Apparently there are 180 billion pebbles on this beach. Must have taken a long time to count… Every now and then we also caught a glimpse of the Fleet Lagoon, the saline stretch of water that separates Chesil Beach from the mainland. This was mostly a calm sail, so we sat there just watching the coastline go by, taking in all the beautiful scenery . We had the music on for a bit, which was rather fun. Just us, in the middle of this huge bay! We’ve been out all day, and we only saw one other yacht. A few fishing boats, but otherwise it was just us, hour after hour.
Some nice places there. It must be great to have the time to explore them in more depth. We felt we didn’t have long enough in each place, and also had to miss out several places we would have liked to see. We enjoyed Weymouth too, especially the lifting bridge!
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It is so difficult, isn’t it, to choose what places to visit and how much time to allocate to each. There’s so much to see and enjoy!
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