Chichester Harbour –

I am really looking forward to my two months on Chichester Harbour with harmony and the Duck Punt.

Local KTLers have started sending me information about the place. Any is a friend from the YBW forum

Well I and other people who know about it are careful who we mention it to !

A lovely quiet place - with a seal colony - is Pilsey Island, directly opposite East Head; it's amazing the crowds at EH don't catch on.

If going around there investigating the Thorney Channel & towards Itchenor, watch out for a lot of nasty pointy stakes on the Northern side which IMO aren't publicised enough and could do a boat a serious mischief ! The remains of some old industry like oysters - I'll have to reread the book ' Chichester Harbour - A History ' by John Reger, an excellent bit of work, the bookshop in Emsworth on the road down to the harbour usually has it in stock.

There's a good little museum in Emsworth, head inland to the roundabout and it's just on the other side, on the left before and opposite the One Stop.

The area around Langstone village ( Chi harbour side ) would be worth a day, as well as the nature reserve & Warblington cemetery, shoreside walk, there's also Pook Lane heading inland from the shore just beyond the reserve, seems a genuine smugglers' lane; pook being a corruption of spook for all the nocturnal goings on.

Rumours persist that there's a tunnel under the nearby Royal Oak pub.

Just across the bridge on Hayling an immediate turn right - on foot - takes one to the old oyster bed pools, a big industry in it's time; at certain states of ebb a serious whirlpool appears inside the pool.

This is also on the old ' Hayling Billy ' railway line, now a very good cycle path the length of the island to the ferry; the old railway supports now give shelter to the LSC boats on that side, I found old postcards of a sailing barge going through the turntable gap in the railway, also of the Mill on Chi side before it was restored - now a multi million £ place, Nevil Shute - who founded Airspeed Aviation at Portsmouth Airfield ( now sadly under PC World ! ) - used to stay there, it was recently owned by a James Bond producer.

The abandoned / wrecked barge just outside is the ' Langstone '.

Just by the mill and nature reserve there's a club operating rowing skiffs which may be of interest to you, they're very active and out most days.

I investigated the quite sophisticated WWII decoy system set up in Langstone Harbour to attract bombers away from Portsmouth, and the reason for the many circular soft spots of mud still there now, for the club newsletter; I doubt of interest to you but you're welcome to a copy.

I have a lot of aerial shots of Langstone SC and immediate area.

Langstone C 1930's

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There's a prehistoric wadeway ( often mistakenly called ' The Roman Road ' , there is a Roman fort on Hayling and I expect they reinforced the wadeway ) running from just outside the Royal Oak to near the slipway at Northney Marina; obviously used at low water.

I found an old history book which mentioned Henry VIII made a decree that all the proceeds from one day at a local fayre were to pay the hermit who lived at the mainland end ( by the Royal Oak, very probably a hostelry even then ! ) to guide people across to Hayling - I can't help thinking of Monty Python.

Years ago I and others were sitting on our moorings minding our own business when the ' All Wheel Drive Club ' turned up by the ' Oak - this was before 4x4 cars were common.

They charged across the wadeway, big union jacks flying from the whip aerials; even if I'd wanted to I couldn't warn them - the OS maps show it as a road, while the marine charts show it was dredged in the 1860's to create the West Cut channel...

Lead Landrover went in with a big splash - to a round of applause from the moorings - and was hauled out in a somewhat bedraggled state by his mate behind who had a winch on the front ( almost certainly for posing purposes and the only time it was used ! ).

The wadeway has lasted 4,000 years and is listed as an ancient monument but has degraded seriously in the 40 odd years I've been there, there are often bait diggers on there with spades which drive me nuts,

I have been onto the Chichester Harbourmaster ( 01243 512301 ) who replied ' Oh that's naughty, next time you see them give us a call '; they only care about the leg from Itchenor to the entrance and there's more chance of my pulling Bo Derek than seeing a patrol around our way...

I'll attach a few pics of the wadeway taken from a microlight I blagged a ride on - a very poor camera, I was taken by surprise when they said ' fine, hop on ' - honest - the only time I've flown with my Musto wellies in the slipstream.

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The Langstone Starfish

Years ago at the club, a group of us were setting off with our buckets and spades on a mooring works party, when a new member commented “ We should be doing a risk assessment for this ! ”
I replied rather tersely, in those days Elf ‘N Safety was regarded as something for wimps, at least in the public perception, though I have worked with some brilliant engineers who were true Health and Safety experts.

I mentioned ‘we’re possibly strolling over several hundred tons of unexploded Luftwaffe ordnance, so how does that factor in to a risk assessment ?!

Not mentioning that I do still wonder when driving in a spade on my mooring, but that’s more of a nod to history than any real concern; I tend to be fairly cagey if I think I’m really faced with the opportunity of being blown into orbit.

Nowadays however we are all a lot more careful acknowledging risks rather than just relying on that rarest of elements, ‘common’ sense.

A long time ago now my old colleague Dennis Warren was going out at low water to work on his mooring, using a borrowed pair of mud shoes - big plywood jobs to spread the load like Eskimo's use tennis racket-like things on snow & ice.

Dennis, who it must be said was not the slimmest of chaps, suddenly found his foot descend into a patch of softer mud; he’d ‘found’ one of the circular areas of softer mud, a bomb crater.

He soon discovered that every effort to raise one foot only ratcheted the other in deeper; as he was pushing a dinghy with chain and tools, he thought “ I’ll just hang on to the dinghy and rise with the flood tide ” – with this method he’d still be there now !

A surprising train of thought from a very bright bloke, he was Head of Design Liaison at Hawker /BAe Dunsfold on the Harrier and Hawk aircraft programmes, before that involved with the Fairey Delta 2 ‘Faster Than the Sun’ world speed record flights over the South Coast, the first aircraft to exceed and sustain over 1,000mph.

This little interlude in the mud concluded with Dennis being dragged out and plonked ashore by the Coast Guard helicopter, which had been summoned by his wife Pat who thankfully was watching from the slip; a good example of why going out on the mud alone is a bad idea, and a means of summoning help a good one.

All this happened long before the chat about risk assessments, when I couldn’t help remembering what my friend Jenny once told me; her Dad Bob Milne was a Test Pilot for Airspeed at Portsmouth Airfield, which was on the Eastern Road where PC World is now.

The author Nevil Shute ( Norway ) – a very successful aircraft designer as well as writer - was the founder of Airspeed Ltd, and lived for a time during the war at Langstone Mill, before buying Langstone Towers.

As Jenny related, one of her Dads’ daily routine jobs while on test flights during WWII was to ‘count the new bomb craters’ in Langstone Harbour at low states of tide; this sounds rather strange for a Test Pilot, but the reality was that the British had a sophisticated system of decoys, to lure the Luftwaffe bombers Eastwards away from the Portsmouth docks.

Obviously this might not have been terribly popular with the inhabitants of Langstone / Havant / Hayling Island !

The decoy system was codenamed ‘Starfish’, - Langstone was Starfish 16 and the most succesful decoy - also used at places like Coventry but sadly only operational after the catastrophic raid there.

It consisted of selectable oil, wood and diesel fuelled fires of variable intensity, both around the Langstone Harbour shore and on rafts afloat simulating the burning docks at Portsmouth to visually attract the bombers

These fires were controlled from various small bunkers around the harbour, with the main command bunker on Butser Hill, where ‘Micks’ Snacks’ continues the tradition by distributing flaming hot Chilli Burgers today.

Also the German electronic guidance beams for the bombers were ‘bent’ by British countermeasures in a combined effort to try to protect the vital Naval yards.

These radio beams were very like the comically vague RDF we ageing yotties cursed in the 1970s’- 80’s; considering that, I almost feel sorry for the Germans !

I’ve always been amused that the Allied codeword for the German guidance beams was ‘headache’ and the countermeasures the Brits developed were called ‘Aspirin’ !

At Tangmere Museum there is a simulator of the Luftwaffe guidance beams with a cockpit mockup one can try, on closing the English coast the countermeasures gradually come in and it’s very difficult to get on target; having tried that and imagining the visual lure of the Starfish fires, I can easily understand why so many German bombs fell in Langstone Harbour.

Sadly that’s not to say a great many bombs didn’t make their target at the Naval base, there were heavy casualties and damage was near critical at one stage.

The threat of obliteration was so great the crucial mine and torpedo countermeasures development and research establishment HMS Vernon had to undertake the disruption of relocating to the commandeered Roedean girls school along the coast East of Brighton.

The German raids were very intense, my father was at Ryde on RN initial training during the heaviest attacks on Portsmouth; he describes it as stupidly dangerous to walk outside without a tin hat, due to the falling shrapnel from the anti-aircraft guns on the Island, Solent forts and around Portsmouth itself.

My Father – an RN volunteer at Bembridge for initial training - was on fire pump duty and rather dreading going out into this lot, but thankfully they were kept at base, he remembers the sky full of aircraft and artillery…

" There were batteries of anti-aircraft rockets going up from the mainland and wrecked aircraft on fire in the Solent, it seemed impossible any aircraft could get through to Portsmouth, but they certainly did "; on one such particularly heavy series of night raids Cowes was badly bombed as well.

The Polish destroyer ‘ Blistowyka ‘ – Lightning – having escaped the German overrun of her country was in Cowes for a refit, at Whites’ yard where she’d been built, and her skipper had refused the order to unload ammunition; he knew something was up when he saw a German recce’ aircraft in the afternoon, and when the town was attacked that night the destroyer’s considerable armament was used to defend the town.

The ship was awarded a medal, and the surviving crew members still meet up in Cowes at an annual official party – this is mentioned in the museum at East Cowes.

Despite her efforts nearly 100 people were killed in Cowes on that one night.

The poor chap in the next room to Dad was so frightened with all this he shot himself dead; it must have seemed like hell itself for raw volunteers.

Given the severity of the damage the Luftwaffe did manage to inflict despite everything put in their way, the importance of ‘Starfish’ is clear.

It was one of the many integrated defences the lack of any of which would have spelt even more considerable problems for Britain to carry on through this worst period of World War Two.

Hardly anything remains today of the Langstone Starfish system, but there is a control bunker and memorial at Sinah Warren on Hayling Island, where the decoy worked only too well and they were bombed by the Luftwaffe with many losses.

So spare a thought before dropping a daggerboard or driving in a spade; though nowadays I’d be more worried about having a current harbour dues plaque; now that is a modern day way to get blown out of the water !…
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This is about Dylan Winter's Blog, Sailing around Britain.

3 Responses to “Chichester Harbour –”

  1. 23 February, 2014 at 11:08 amSteve says:

    Andy is a mine of information for this part of the world…. there’s supposedly a submarine buried in the mud up by the Royal Oak,and the Mill was also owned by one of the Beatles for a while… (George Harrison I think??)… for the duck punt,don’t forget Langstone Harbour.. a lot of people say it’s boring, compared to Chi it probably is, but it is also very remote/quiet (if you forget the motorway noise) with some lovely bird reserves on the islands in the middle… lots of meandering channels…. in Chi, I love the Prinstead Channel that runs up to Paynes.. lovely…

  2. 1 March, 2014 at 8:51 pmbrien brien says:

    Hello Dylan,

    Not received any dvd. What’s up? Need prepayment? No problem for me.

    Best regards,

    Brien Gilroy

  3. 1 March, 2014 at 8:57 pmdylan winter says:

    sorry B

    send me another email and I will resend it

    sometimes they dissappear

    [email protected]

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