Gosport Boat Jumble

Last Sunday I went to the Gosport boat jumble. As my boat jumble page suggests, this very early in the year jumble can be a source of bargains. The cold weather tends to put people off. This year it was warmer, so there were more people, but they quickly went, I assume because they were looking for specific things for winter projects.

I started off my journey here:

Lovely Havant train station. Love the early 20th century aesthetics. The train down to Portsmouth Harbour was £4.80 return. To drive round the harbour to Gosport and back would cost more than that in petrol.

At  10:30 on a Sunday morning the harbour was pretty still:

Then a short ferry trip:

Over the water to Turktown.

£3-odd return. Yeah, now it's adding up to the same as petrol round the harbour, but I'm doing something different for a change, plus it's pay-and -display parking at the boat jumble so that means public transport just pips the car in this instance.

Last year I got bungie sail ties and rope very cheap, this year I went prepared with a big rucksack.

Had I wanted to carry it home I could have had a Mercury 3.3Hp outboard for £30. A guy was haggling for just the petrol cap off it and the vendor was saying he could have the cap for £30... with the rest of the outboard. :-)

Odd bits like anchors for a tenner, large fenders for a tenner or 4 for £30, and like last year there were a few rope bargains.

Last year a stall had a few real bargains like cheap hatches. This year he was in the same place again (2nd bay on the right) :

I didn't have enough money last year, but this year I was prepared. Sure enough, he had a couple of Lewmar Ocean 20 hatches, £30 each. I only need one to go on the front of Sprite to replace the non-opening port-light at the front. So I bagged one:

It needs a clean and the acrylic needs polishing, but I can get plastic polish from work. On this one the friction mechanism was jammed, but literally 5 seconds with an allen key to back off the tension released it. Now it opens fine and still holds the hatch open.

Ideally I would have liked a 10 inch square Ocean 10 hatch, but this one should still fit the front panel of the cabin. It's 13 inches wide and the front panel I measured at over 20 inches. It's even the flanged version, so the flange will cover the sides of the cut hole. All I need is to use some of my spare marine ply to make a trim round the hatch on the inside of the cabin to receive the mounting screws. The downside is it'll take all of my woodworking skills to make something that looks horrendous. I may trawl the DIY stores for a decent-looking solution. :-)

The rest of the Boat Jumble looked like this:

As you can see, not particularly busy, which is why I like it. With most summer boat jumbles the bargains have all been bought up within 5 minutes of opening time.

After walking round twice to be sure I didn't miss anything, I walked back to the ferry. The last picture is a view of Portsmouth from the other side. A view I very rarely see and I don't visit Gosport often:

On the way back I noticed the dredging barge was working off railway jetty making it deeper for the new carrier due later this year. There was a Belgian minesweeper and a South African Navy ship docked there. Hopefully it doesn't dredge up another unexploded WW2 bomb while they're there and cause an international incident. It seems they come across a new unexploded bomb every few weeks.

The South African ship was in dock to commemmorate the SS Mendi disaster, a ship that went down off the Isle of Wight.


And that was it, Back to the train station and home.