In fact, I’ve been here ten years, and based on the ‘A’ test, this is the highest tide I’ve witnessed.

In fact, that cross is a very important safety feature for any of the marine users navigating this part of the English Channel for its the Sovereign Light Tower.

Around about that point on the sea bed there’s a sand bank and at low tide it can be as shallow as about 2.5-3 meters.  That’s been a hazard to shipping over the years and has seen many ships run aground.

In olden days, to prevent this happening, there was an actual ship called the Royal Sovereign that had a lighthouse on it and was anchored on the bank to prevent ships running aground.

In modern times, the boat has been replaced by a more formal structure, which consists of a tower sticking into the sea bed with a helicopter platform and a lighthouse on top of it.

If you get a chance take one of the boat tours out there, it’s certainly well worth a look.

It’s a great liberating experience.  So, you might be mistaken in thinking that well, Eastbourne’s next to the sea.  I’ll go and hire a Jet Ski.

Well, unfortunately you might be a little bit disappointed.

Over the last few years, I’ve known or heard of a few budding entrepreneurs that have looked into setting up a Jet Ski rental business and, whilst I’m not sure about the business sense of that necessarily because, although Eastbourne is very sunny, quite often there’s days when it probably wouldn’t be safe to use a Jet Ski out there, so you have a limited number of days a year to actually rent your Jet Skis.

But, they always seem to be prevented on grounds of health and safety!

Personally I think that health and safety is important and controls need to be in place to prevent accidents from happening. But as long as you apply a little common sense and ensure users of small power craft are kept away from swimmers and other sea users, then there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be a safe and fun experience for everyone.

You may still see the odd Jet Ski whizzing across the sea and essentially there are two places I know of that go off the beach.

The first is actually in Pevensey Bay there, the Aqua Club.  Quite a few turn up and launch Jet Skis on trailers and use a winch to tow them into the sea so they can enjoy Pevensey Bay where there’s a marked off area where you can actually launch your Jet Skis or other water craft to get past the swimming zones.

The other place is close to the Sovereign Centre Swimming Pool, just off of Prince William Drive, and on the beach behind there, where all the fishing boats used to be in the years before the marina was built, and in one of the large garage type sheds  is the Eastbourne Jet Ski Club which like Pevensey uses winches to launch from the beach.

Now, going back to probably the early 2000s when North Harbour wasn’t particularly populated and there weren’t many berths with boats in, you used to be able to do a kind of test drive around North Harbour, but couldn’t go very fast because there’s a speed limit, but you can still take it out and try it out, but now that’s more populated with boats and houses, the noise and the safety factor mean that that’s no longer possible.

So, whilst you can berth a Jet Ski in the marina you need to bear in mind is every time you want to use it, you have to go through the locks. This means you need to be very manouverable to make sure you don’t run into the other boats that are waiting for the locks to operate. So your Jet Ski needs to be one of the more advanced versions which has a reverse gear so that you can easily move back and forth as required by the Harbour master and fellow boat users

With a lot more Russians moving to the harbour the rumour mill has been going into overdrive about every mega-rich oil baron and his comrade.

Apparently this vessel was too big to fit into the marina so it moored where the tide wouldn’t cause it to run aground, unlike the sailboat in my earlier post this month ;-)

For the past few days, the following sailing boat hasn’t moved (even when the tide has meant it could do). I don’t know whether the owner’s are just trying to save a few euros, or whether they may have experienced technical problems, but it’s made a different view from the promenade and always brings a smile to my face ;-)