Day 228 - August 16th

We spent today on Portland again.

In the morning, we walked part of the South West Coast path, from The Wild Chesil Centre to The Beehive Café and back - roughly 3.5 miles. It was an extremely hot day!

Our reward for walking in the hot sun was a cake at The Beehive Café.

In the afternoon, we returned to the Wild Chesil Centre to collect tickets for a boat trip we had pre-booked. 

The hour long boat trip was on the Wildlife Trust's Fleet Explorer. The Fleet Explorer is a shallow drafted boat specifically designed and built to explore the lower reaches of the Fleet Lagoon. The boat runs regular trips for visitors between April and October and the trips helps fund the running of the Fleet Explorer, which is also used to protect wildlife on Chesil and the Fleet by clearing litter, research, monitoring and helping the Little Tern Project. Any extra profit goes into supporting Dorset Wildlife Trust’s local conservation work.

There were 11 of us plus Roger the skipper on the boat trip and for an hour we rode round the Fleet Lagoon as Roger pointed out places and wildlife of interest and told us about the work of the Wildlife Trust on Chesil and the Fleet..

h

On the banks of the Fleet Lagoon are a number of huts. Roger explained that none of the huts have utilities but despite this sell for phenomenal sums of money.

We noticed quite a few rowing boats at the bottom of a cliff and Roger explained that they were fly-tipped by fathers/grandfather, etc who had bought them to take their children/grand-children fishing and then dumped them over the cliff edge when the children had gotten fed-up of fishing!

Half way through the trip Roger asked if anyone would like to have a go at driving the boat. Lara eagerly volunteered sand being the only volunteer, drove the boat the majority of the way back to the jetty.

We really enjoyed the boat trip and would certainly recommend to to others.

After the boat trip, before returning back to our holiday home, we decided to visit some of the view points around Portland.

One particular view point is near to HMP Verne where we were able to get a good view of the coastline and the controversial Bibby Stockholm barge which is being used to house asylum seekers.

Entrance to HMP Verne

Next, we drove to the Olympic Rings stone sculpture, created to celebrate the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games of which Weymouth & Portland National Sailing Academy was host of the sailing event.

The view of Chesil beach was amazing.