A month earlier we’d had such a nice time on Shieldhall (see: Cruise: Steamship Shieldhall) that when we learned that another steamship, the Paddle Steamer Waverley (the world’s last seagoing paddle steamer) would be spending the 2022 summer season in our home port we looked at the different trips she was undertaking and booked ourselves on one. What we opted for was a circumnavigation of the Isle of Wight, starting and ending at Portsmouth Harbour, with a stop twice at Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight to pick up and drop off passengers from the island, and to drop off and pick up those who wanted to spend time on the island before coming back to Portsmouth.
In this first part of this short series covering our day’s experience aboard Waverley I’ll show photos of the trip out from Portsmouth to Yarmouth. If you’re the sort of person looking for facts about Waverley then you can find those out, along with its history, on the ship’s website. As always, this is more a travelogue and less a review.
An important thing to note right away is where to board Paddle Steamer Waverley in Portsmouth. Stupidly, because we’ve lived here all our lives, we thought we knew where the ferries came and left, and this turned out to be very, very wrong. It also doesn’t help that there are two Isle of Wight ferry departure points in Portsmouth depending on whether you want to go to Fishbourne or Ryde and the signs around the Gunwharf area and Portsmouth and Southsea train station where we were directed to find the ferry are ambiguous at best.
Great story, Mark. Now are you going to tell me where to find Waverley in Portsmouth?
Yes, I do apologise. Go into Portsmouth and Southsea train station and walk to the far end of the platform – the bit towards the water – and you’ll see signs in there. It’s effectively part of the train station, accessible from inside it, but not outside it (except by water, of course). If, like us, you see signs outside the station for the Isle of Wight ferry then don’t follow them to the Wightlink Ferry Terminal like we did or you’ll suddenly be speed-walking your way back when you realise how wrong you are. If you’re looking on Google Maps then find the ferry route that is marked Portsmouth to Ryde, and that’s where you need to be, even though you’re not going to Ryde at all. Hopefully, that’s all clear. Never say I’m not helpful.
So, eventually at the terminal, huge number of people waiting, but we were soon aboard and we weren’t long in leaving and a chance to see the familiar sights of the Portsmouth skyline from the water. The Spinnaker Tower, Gunwharf, HMS Warrior, the buildings along the front at Spice Island and Old Portsmouth, the Round Tower, and the Hot Walls.
We didn’t have quite the same weather or class of vessel or size of waving or just interested crowds when departing Portsmouth as we’d had when we’d cruised out of this stretch of the harbour a year earlier on Scarlet Lady, but it’s interesting to compare the photos here and from that post. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, and I’ll make no apologies for local bias, but Portsmouth is one of the best cities in the world to sail in or out of if you like history and just general interest. More cruise companies should use Portsmouth as their start and end point, and hopefully they will now that the new cruise terminal is being built at the port; it would be absolutely fantastic to see a company like P&O Cruises, for instance, run a few itineraries from Portsmouth for their smaller vessels (Aurora and Arcadia).
Away from Portsmouth and onto the Solent, and we stayed outside long enough on the deck to enjoy the mild excitement of the pilot getting offloaded from Waverley back onto his boat. If you’ve never cruised and never seen a pilot boat coming alongside for the pilot to embark or disembark then it’s an interesting spectacle, and if you have cruised before and seen this before then it’s still interesting because everything’s interesting on the water. You can just tell that everyone peering over the side as the boat edged closer and closer to Waverley had seen this all before and they’d see it all again.
A bonus experience of our cruise aboard Paddle Steamer Waverley out of Portsmouth when we did it was that we got to pass close by the aircraft carrier, HMS Prince Of Wales. Completed after Britain had handed the national racists a gun to shoot itself in the foot, her subsequent disappointing service and broken-down condition symbolised all that is wrong with Brexit and is the reason why we lovingly referred to her as HMS Metaphor. First-time readers of this site might be thinking “Woah! There was no need for a political jibe there!” and regular readers will be thinking “Ah, good, I can now check off the Politics square on my Mark’s Travel Post bingo card.” My site, my rules.
We headed inside Waverley at this point. There’s only so long we can go without a drink at sea, after all. We stopped briefly for a look at the engine room as one of the benefits of boarding these small steamships is you’re granted far more access than you would on a modern cruise ship. However, with a day circling around the Isle of Wight to come (spoiler: we thought) we decided that we’d give it more of a nose later on, and made our way to one of the lounges to see what the bar had to offer. With Waverley being Scottish-based we had to see what the Caledonia Best was like, and it was impossible not to liken the lounge to a Scottish pub; the upholstery and bar were ridiculously similar to an inn we’d stayed at in Scotland years ago.
And that’s how we enjoyed the rest of this pleasant cruise across the Solent on Waverley towards the Isle of Wight: a drink in the lounge, then a wander outside to see the views, then back inside, and repeat.
I’ll finish this first part of our Paddle Steamer Waverley cruise experience as the ship pulled up at the pier at Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight. We were amazed by the queue of people waiting to get on the ship and hoped that enough already aboard were going to be spending the day ashore to not leave it feeling rammed.
In the next post in this series I’ll take us on our cruise around the Isle of Wight… unless something unexpected happens that causes that not to take place. Sadly for all those people on the pier at Yarmouth, that’s exactly what occurs.