Tragedy.

Got to the boat early today with the aim of getting an early season sail in.

It wasn't to be, due to the boat next to mine doing a submarine impersonation:

I called the harbourmaster and told him about the boat and also that I'd moved to an unoccupied mooring buoy away from the wreck. The problem was the wind was due to veer to the East later in the day which would put my boat directly on top of this one. I didn't fancy mine becoming a statistic too.

We had quite a high tide today, what with the Sun and Moon in conjunction and the low pressure adding about 18 inches to the tide there was an impressively long period of high water.

The boat next door refused to die completely, poking its bow above the water at high tide:

Richard, the local diver who tends to get the recovery jobs like this came out and had a look. I'm not sure what's happened with the boat because it wants to float, it's like the back end is pinned down in the mud.

The pic above also shows how close it is to my mooring (the vertical white Fender/Buoy on the left of the picture).

Not only did I have this drama, the wind was really increasing in force. At half nine Solent coastguard issued a gale warning up to force 8, which came out of nowhere. Up until then the Met Office forecasts has been for force 4-5 possibly 6. It was such a dramatic change a number of yachts queried it on VHF. By then a couple of yachts had already left the Marina, so I hope they were okay. In the pond a NE wind is about the worst as it blows the length of the harbour. At one point at its worst we had 3ft waves. Although when I drove home I drove down the seafront and the Solent looked relatively calm compared to the forecast.

One wierd thing later in the day just after lunch was we had a diesel slick blow past us, followed by quite a bit of flotsam. The sunk boat above had a petrol outboard so it couldn't have come from that (and the wind was in the wrong direction), so I just wonder if with the wind and the waves another boat had gone under somewhere else in the harbour.

So a bit of an exciting day and not what I had planned at all!

UPDATE:

Looks like the Force 8 never happened after all, just checked the weather charts for the past 24 Hours and all I can see is the expected 4-5 gusting to 6.