These are the details of our cruise on Sunday the 17th May from Brundall down to Great Yarmouth and then via Lowestoft to Ramsgate the next day, which involved cruising out of the Yarmouth Road past Lowestoft and then nearly due South well offshore of the Shipwash and Sunk buoys marking the inshore sandbanks and then east of Kentish Knock to finally cruise SSW towards North Foreland and down to the Ramsgate buoyed channel. This trip was undertaken with another Broom Boat, Ikon, with Chris and Maggie Cole and guests on board from the Owners Club, and consisted of a passage of around eleven hours at knots through the water.
The sea passage had a brief following tide for the very first part of the passage and then an adverse north-going flood tideor kn for most of the rest but with the 2 knot near-Spring tide speeding us to our destination at Ramsgate.
There was a first perceived a danger of a partly beam swell from the South West across the Thames Estuary in mid-passage, but the breeze was due to moderate to knots and waves at 0. In the event, this part of the trip was almost dead calm and the most comfortable Thames estuary crossing I could recall.
It was the last hour approaching Ramsgate that produced a moderate sea. Positioning for this passage had already been undertaken on Saturday evening and took a couple of hours and around 12 further nautical miles down the mid Yare at Brundall, under the Reedham Swing Bridge and on to the lower Yare where we moored up at Berney Arms for the night.
First thing on Sunday we then cruised across Breydon Water for some 45 mins before we passed under the Breydon and Haven bridges that lifted for us by prior arrangement around 9. We were also accompanied on this earlier passage by our dog Max and then a hire car was available on Monday from Ramsgate to drive him back as he was being accommodated in kennels for the subsequent visit to Dunkirk.
