Additional notes pages are intended to provide information of less interest to the general reader than the story of the trip, but which might be useful to anyone planning another trip in the same area. This provides context for any comments about weather and sea conditions or tides in the trip write-up. Back to main article

Resources:

Tides: tidal planning is critical for this area, as tides are strong, change very quickly, and don't behave quite as simply as in other areas. This is because the Solent and Isle of Wight are in the middle of the English Channel which acts as a resonator at the frequency of the diurnal tides (same idea as an organ pipe). Additional features of the channel result in extra oscillations (four in the main channel, up to thirty locally) resulting in features such as the "Young Flood Stand", the "Double High Water" and the ebb only lasting 3¾ hours... One fairly non-technical explanation is reproduced from the Southampton Tide Tables on this site. There is a useful online version of the Tidal Stream Atlas for the Eastern Solent as a .pdf file. There are also, courtesy of HM Harbourmaster, Portsmouth, online versions of the Admiralty Charts for the Eastern Approaches to the Solent and Southampton Water and the Central Solent as (large) .png files. These include no less than 18 and 20 tidal diamonds respectively, with data referred to Portsmouth. You can get tidal predictions for Portsmouth for a week ahead from UKHO or a month ahead from Proudman Oceanographic Lab.. At the time of writing there was a complete tide table for 2010 as a 3.7 Mb .pdf file, but it is scanned from a bought set of tables, so may disappear if the publisher notices and indeed, a corresponding set for 2011 doesn't seem to have appeared. For planning more than a month ahead (as you will want to if trying to see if a trip is feasible for a particular holiday), you'll need tidal prediction software, such as AutoTide, WXtides, TideCalc or Total Tide (see our Tide Prediction FAQ).

There's a lot of useful information about the eastern Solent in the context of a tutorial on sea kayak navigation from kayarchy. A Google books result gives a lot of information about tides in the Solent which we can't reproduce here.

Although tidal streams are referred to HW Portsmouth, tides here are a lot more complex than a simple table of high and low tides every 6¼ hours or so might indicate. There is the "young flood stand" in which the flood is powerful for the first two hours, then slackens off considerably before resuming a big burst leading to high water. This prolongs the flood, and the ebb is very short and powerful. In some places there are two high tides in each cycle, and so on. Any trip here needs very careful tidal planning, especially given the lack of good places to camp and the tide races which exist at various points.

I'm still trying to find a few more notes on the times tide streams turn and the speed of various races for this article.

One source says: In West Solent, W-going starts 1 hour before HW Portsmouth, E-going starts 5 hours after HW. At the Needles the streams change about an hour later. Another source says at the Needles, tide turns east at HW Portsmouth +05:00 (ie. not one hour later). Another source notes that there is an hour and a half difference between the times of setting of streams in close proximity around the Needles.

At Bembridge Ledge, one internet source says West-going stream starts at HW Portsmouth +02:00, but another says local HW is at HW Portsmouth +0:20 and the west-going stream sets roughly at local HW, 1.3 knots neaps, 2.7 knots springs on the north of the island, more on the south.

All of which suggests that consulting a proper printed pilot and charts would be a good idea, rather than trying to cobble together enough information from the internet !!

Weather: The Isle of Wight is in the "Selsey Bill to Lyme Regis" area of the Inshore Waters Forecast.

Solent and Portland Coastguard broadcasts Forecasts and marine safety information on VHF radio in bulletins every three hours from 01:30 UT, the most complete bulletins being the 07:30 and 19:30 ones. There will be an announcement on channel 16 telling you which channel to go to for your nearest transmitter, which will be one of 23, 84 or 86. See the complete listing.

The 2009 trip:

The synoptic charts recorded below are for midday (GMT) each day of the Easter 2009 trip (downloaded as current charts, not forecasts) and the tide times are as predicted by Autotide for the reference station of Portsmouth (none of the online resources are good at telling you the times of the tides in the past).

Friday 10th April

	Tide height	Time (GMT)
	L 0.8	04:49
	H 4.6	11:58
	L 0.8	17:06

Saturday 11th April

	Tide height	Time (GMT)
	H 4.7	00:16
	L 0.9	05:25
	H 4.6	12:33
	L 0.9	17:40

Sunday 12th April

	Tide height	Time (GMT)
	H 4.6	00:49
	L 1.0	06:00
	H 4.5	13:09
	L 1.1	18:16

Monday 13th April

	Tide height	Time (GMT)
	H 4.5	01:22
	L 1.1	06:36
	H 4.4	13:43
	L 1.3	18:54

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