Yarmouth's lights

We left home at about 8pm to drive down to Lymington where we would be catching the car ferry across to Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight. A long weekend staying with Bob and Mary was very appealing as they are always tremendous hosts and we would be staying only a couple of hundred yards from the sea at Freshwater Bay. Yippeeee.

I was born by the sea, and grew up in a house beside and overlooking the Thames estuary, in which I spent my early years playing in the water and being very aware of the tide, particularly when it moved the shoreline far away. In my teens, I spent every long summer holiday by Mediterranean, again only yards from the sandy shoreline. In my twenties I headed off to spend four winter months on the pacific coastline of Mexico, indulging my love of sea and sand under the hot tropical sun.

When I reached thirty, I was drawn away to south-east asia for fifteen months, a large part of which was spent yet again on the Indian Ocean, or the Gulf of Siam as it was probably still called then. Bali and beyond called later, before the Sydney beaches in summertime drew me to frolic with frisbees and surf.

Nowadays, I rarely see the sea, even though the Bristol Channel and the Severn estuary are only about twenty miles away. We were both excited to be on the move and the idea of a ferry at twelve-thirty at night was actually rather enticing. I love ferries and have been travelling on them since I was two years old, when we used to travel over to Germany where my father was stationed in the army of the Rhine. The first car ferry I can remember was from Dover to Dunkerque, when the cars had to be winched up and dropped down onto the boat!

As we waited on the quayside at Lymington, we could hear owls hooting in the nearby woods, whilst Helena and I wandered about with cameras in the dark taking odd pictures of strange lights and reflections in the riverside yacht basin. I stayed on deck when we set off and again I played with long exposures which I had been meaning to try experimenting with. I went inside the lounge as we neared Yarmouth and I sat beside Helena looking out over the bow of the ferry. I rather liked this picture of Helena and the lights of the approaching harbour through the window. We would soon be there.