Sunday 6 January 2013

Rowing across the Solent

I rowed across the Solent yesterday in Langstone Cutters' four-oar skiff Mabel, for a pub lunch at Cowes. On the return leg, we nervously watched as a black hull on the horizon got larger and larger with alarming speed. You don't really appreciate just how much faster a ship is than a small rowing boat until you are in the path of one. It's like playing chicken with the juggernauts on the motorway.
Well, as you can see we just got stuck in and the tanker passed safely astern, along with the blue tug behind that helps her steer round the sharp right-hander into Southampton Water.
But it could have gone very horrible:

3 comments:

Bursledon Blogger said...

question is did you keep out of the 1000 meter exclusion zone ahead of the ship? - clearly the yacht's man in the video hadn't.

Chris Partridge said...

There was a good deal of discussion of the exclusion zone in the boat. It is impossible to judge how far away a monster tanker really is to any accuracy by eye, beyond 'too close for comfort'. The Harbour Patrol Boat (aka 'the blue boat') should have warned us off if we were in the exclusion zone but it wasn't around.

bonnie said...

Looks like the strectch of the Hudson that runs past Manhattan and is known as North River. Liners and tankers and barges, oh my! There are a lot of things that I miss about paddling that area, but the stress I always felt when crossing shipping channels used by "the big guys" is not one of them!