Brighton.......

We pulled in at Newhaven on route to Brighton, it was all a bit changeable out at sea and we didn't want a repeat of last week when it blew up badly! We quite liked Newhaven but it was so noisy with the ferry and the steel recycling point not to mention the seagull noises blasted out every hour over a tannoy, presumably to scare off the seagulls!
We thought we might have an evening cruise to Brighton the following day but the weather seemed to change every time we looked at it. I awoke at around 7am and peeked out to see thick fog. I could hear the raindrops on the roof and thought the best course of action would be to return to bed and forget about Brighton for today. The problem was that the weather was forecast to be bad until the following Sunday, a week in Newhaven? Umm a couple of days maybe but a week would be a struggle. We had a good lie in and re-checked the weather on the Internet. It didn't look that bad. The German visitors next to us set off about 11am, just as the skies cleared and the sun came out. It looked like the best time for us would be around 2pm so we thought we would get showered and tidy up then take a walk up to the harbour wall and see how it looked. It looked OK to me, the flags at the fort on the top on the hill were still. We decided to go for it and arrived back at the boat in time to hear someone on a sailing boat being told off by harbour control via the tannoy for entering the harbour without permission! Oops - at least it wasn't us this time!!. There was a huge ship coming in so we had to wait for that to clear before leaving.
It was a little lumpier than I had imagined, oh dear, sorry Martyn! Martyn hadn't been over keen to leave but I had kind of persuaded him and felt immediately guilty. What if it turned into a repetition of the Rye trip? It was only 6 miles but anything can happen within that 6 miles. Then we spotted the buoys, were they crab pots or markings for nets? We weren't sure but they were everywhere and with the lumpy sea it was difficult to keep on course and away from them. In addition we spotted two fishing boats pair trawling. They required a wide berth so we were trapped between the trawlers and the orange buoys. A couple of miles from Brighton the sea seemed to calm down although there were grey skies ahead. I looked back at where we had come from and saw the sun shining on Beachy Head - typical! We arrived safely and in good time though which was a relief.
We called Brighton marina and were given our instructions for where to berth up. This is always the most stressful, especially when you don't know the layout of the marina. We found the berth allocated and looked at each other, oh no! The berth looked only just big enough for us and was surrounded by very expensive looking sailing boats. Luckily we had a helping hand from one of the children on one of the boats and pulled in without issue.
So here we are, in Brighton. A place that when we arrived here by scooter back in the nineties I could only dream of arriving by boat. It's a special place to be!