River Crouch Photos

Optimists

Seals

Inner Crouch Buoy

Small Gaffer

Yacht with Spinnaker


Yesterday I had a very enjoyable sail on the River Crouch, and while on the water I had my Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-W 110 camera at the ready. The wonderful thing about this sort of digital camera is that you don’t have to worry how many photos you take, because there’s always an inexhaustible memory on the storage card, or so it seems to me. The limiting factor is the battery charge, which means an eye has to be kept on the battery icon to check if the battery is running out of juice.



I was not disappointed with opportunities for taking photos, but if I had had a more sophisticated camera with a 10 or 12 times optical zoom I could have taken better shots with far more detail. This was apparent when it came to taking photographs of the seals basking in the sun on the spit of Foulness. I was able to sail ‘Ladybird’ to within 50 metres of them, which wasn’t close enough for my camera’s limited 4 times optical zoom to do the scene justice. Nevertheless, my photo clearly shows six very fat seals.



The photos give an indication of the perfection of the weather for sailing. There was just a light south-easterly for most of the time. When ‘Ladybird’ left her mooring around 1100, the tide was ebbing and the Optimist fleet was being supervised by volunteers in a rib. After a pleasant sojourn at anchor by the seals I made sail and idly let the flood tide and the gentle wind convey me and my boat towards Burnham. To the west of the Inner Crouch Buoy a modern small gaffer came close enough for my camera to take a reasonable photo of her; then a yacht with a colourful spinnaker overhauled ‘Ladybird’, presenting another opportunity for a snapshot.



By mid-afternoon there were many more sailing craft on the water than when had I set out, and this was not surprising, because surely it had been the finest day of the year. Summer had truly arrived. Indeed a distant cuckoo confirmed this to me by calling his repetitive notes.



Links


International Optimists

http://www.optimistsailing.org.uk/new/home.htm


River Crouch

http://www.burnham.org.uk/rivercrouch.htm


Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-W 110

http://www.sony.co.uk/product/dsc-w-series/dsc-w110