2024 – England – Dorset – Weymouth & Portland Bill

An opportunity in early August for a few days sailing out of Weymouth on Dorsets English Channel coast was too good to pass on. So Sue and i took the train from our W London family, a 4 hour trip, down to join my brother and sister in law on their yacht that was lying at the Marina at Weymouth.

Weymouth is a wonderful blend of an English seaside town coupled with an old fishing port, which makes it such a character filled place. It’s School Holidays and the town is filled with families enjoying the lovely sandy beach, gently sloping into the bay, warm sea water and a safe family location. An Esplanade of Georgian Guest Houses & Hotels wraps around the bay, looking east to the white cliffs above Lulworth Cove and Durdle Dor.

At the south end of the beach, a channel guides the River Wey from where it reaches the sea in past the Northe Fort, up through the fishing vessels that line both sides of the channel, under the “Town Bridge”, and through to the Inner Harbour and Marina beyond. The pretty colours of the buildings, the streets filled with happy holiday makers, shops busy – all in all the epitome of the English on their English Seaside Summer Holiday!

The “Town Bridge”, first built in 1590 to link the two sides of the River Wey – Weymouth on the northern side and Melcombe Regis on the south. What was originally a wooden structure, by 1930 when the current 6th bridge was installed had the become the “hydraulically operated lifting bascule bridge” we see today. From 8am, and then every 2 hours the bridge is raised on the dot to allow boats to move through.

So its quite an operation to take a yacht through the Town Bridge with the vagaries of wind, tide, narrow channel , other boats and hundreds of tourists lining the approaches and recording your efforts for their “holiday snaps”!! I was puzzled at the number of foreign visitors that we seemed to see as we motored through the bridge on our way downstream towards our eventual destination of Portland Bill. But on arrival there we found visiting Cruise Ships in dock – problem solved!!

Until 2015 a ferry service ran from Weymouth to the Channel Islands and on to St Malo in France. With that moving to the bigger centre of Poole, the port was left with its local fishing fleet and the hundreds of yachts that visit or call Weymouth their home port. As we found out at the excellent “Bennett’s Fish & Chip Shop”, the locally caught fish is excellent – “flat fish in the spring, bass and channel whiting in the colder winter months”. In addition crab, lobsters are harvested from from pots that sailors keep a keen lookout for as they can be quite a trap should pots and their lines get caught on propellers or around boat keels.

We split our sailing time between Weymouth and Portland Bill which lies to the south and just around the corner so to speak at the southern end of the “29 km Tombola that is Chesil Beach”. Known as a “tied island”, the Bill is quite a stunning topographical feature as can perhaps be seen from the slightly misty photos. I should explain that a “tombola” is a spit of land that joins one piece of land ie mainland Dorset, to another piece of land, ie the Tied Island of Portland Bill.

The “tied island” of Portland Bill has an interesting history. One of the largest “man made” harbours in the world, the two breakwaters were constructed from 1849, with convict prisoners at HM Prison Portland ( still there today on top of the Bill), extracting 10,000 tons of stone from the local quarries every week. The construction was complete by 1872 and the harbour became a Royal Naval base, initially as a “coaling station” and then for training and research, with the Channel Squadron established there in 1858. A key naval facility during both World Wars in May 1944 it became a major demarcation point for the DDay landings in Normandy. But times change and in 1995 Royal Navy operations ceased at Portland.

Today, Portland has a bit of a “sad neglected air” to it. The harbour became a home to the Sailing Events of the 2012 Olympic Games that were based largely in London. And it is a magnificent venue for an event like that. A Yacht Marina has also been established, with associated support industries. But when the Navy left, there were two massive blocks of apartments that had been under construction for “single personnel”. Both can be seen in the above photo. One building on the left has been completed but the one on the right is a concrete shell eyesore, as it looks down on the visiting Cruise Ships in their bright colours and 24 hour movies on grand display on their superstructure, the sounds echoing on the wind.

Yet again, the County of Dorset has come up trumps for us on our visit – just excellent!!