We had two days of blistering heat and no wind.

As a result there was lots of motoring, anchoring and swimming and certainly no sea sickness.

We were based in Cowes where each of the fours sailing excursions began and ended.

Here we see the teaching staff leaving cowes on an eveing excursion to Beaulieu.

You can see the Red Funnel ferry in the background leaving at the same time.

On the first day in the mornining, 'Atlantis' & 'Quadriga' motored out of cowes towards in the direction of Newtown and decided that they could try sailing. This was only possible by using the outgoing tide to generate some apparent wind by pushing the boats through the air.

We drifted in company until we nearly reached the Beaulieu river entrance and then upset the sunbathers by turning on the engines and headed back past Cowes to Osborne bay.

Osborne Bay is a protected anchorage just below Osborne House, which incidentally was Queen Victoria's favourite residence.

Here almost everyone got very wet either voluntarilty by jumping in or with a little help from some students!

One or two even went part way up the mast which was a lot of fun especially when the wash from a passing ship caused the boats to rock quite violently.

We returned to Cowes to pick up the next group and the much needed lunch & refreshments and after lunch we motored to Newtown against the tide.

On the way Atlantis stopped in Thorness bay where some of the group decided to swim but found that the tide was still quite strong even close inshore. Luckily we had taken the precaution of laying out a floating line with a fender attached so that we could pull in the exhausted swimmers. See how tired they look here!

After a cup of tea to warm up the swimmers and refresh the crew ( seen here on the right), we raised the anchor and motored on towards Newtown.

But it was already time to return by the time we arrived there and met the other group in 'Quadriga' near the entrance and motored back to Cowes in company.

A pleasant hour or so was spent here, swimming , sunbathing and the occasional water fight where 'Miss'

was more than just a bit wet. We motored back to Cowes for lunch and picked up the fourth group.

The picture below shows exactly where we did not go ( need to find the right plan) over the two days.

Click on it for a larger picture

Click on the picture for a windows media file of short video clips joined up on together.

It is about 8mb and should play on window media player 9 and 10 .

The originals clips are low resolution taken with the same stills camera which only allows 15 seconds clips maximum. However it does show how much fun was had by all.