There’s not a lot to say about the return trip from Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight to Portsmouth, but if you’d like to see some photographs of the sail from the island to the mainland then you’ve come to the right place. If you’ve read the first two posts in this short series covering our day’s cruise aboard Paddle Steamer Waverley then you’ll already know that the plan to sail around the Isle of Wight had been curtailed thanks to an engine problem, so we’d spent some time ashore exploring the castle and grabbing a few drinks before simply waiting to head across the Solent back to our home city.
It was nice to see Ventura at sea as we headed towards Portsmouth. We’d most recently seen her on another steamship cruise down the Solent a month earlier, and she was a ship we were familiar with, having cruised on her to Belgium in 2017 and to the Canary Islands and Portugal in 2021.
As we neared Portsmouth we also had the pleasure of seeing the hovercraft head out in the opposite direction.
It was nice to see some people down on the Round Tower and around Gunwharf waving as we came back in past Old Portsmouth to the port.
And that concludes our trip aboard the world’s only ocean-going paddle steamship. It wasn’t quite the day we’d wanted but it was a nice day out nevertheless and we’re always happy when we’re on the water somewhere. Hopefully, it won’t be too long before Waverley has another season down here on the south coast, and when she does then we’ll try to get that circumnavigation of the Isle of Wight done again.