Harwich - Sea Palling - Blakeney

[stchristopher]

I've seen a few post over the years regards Sea Palling and thought what a wonderful anchorage it looked. We had always wanted to go to Blakeney, so decided to anchor at Sea Palling overnight on our way from Harwich.

We had 4.0m behind the middle reef (the one to the left of the volunteer lifeboat station as you look to shore) approaching high water. There was a bit of swell in the morning, but apart from that we had a good night.

Keeping off the 10m contour we avoided the worst of the lobster pots off cromer and entered blakeney harbour about an hour and a half before HW. We would have waited but decided to follow a fishing boat in. Depth over the bar was 2.7m and least depth in the harbour on route to a mooring was 2.1m.

I had my first go at a short video taken on a phone (apologies for quality), and edited using Windows Movie Maker. Unfortuantely this was the only piece of music I could import.

This is nowhere near as good as Dylan's excellent productions. We can only aspire.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-jAUmDUTgg

 

[Habebty]

Nice one, I have always fancied doing the same at Sea Palling. Went that way from Ipswich to Wells last summer but the weather wasn't quite settled enough to give it a go.
How much water was there at low water at Sea Palling behind the reefs? - although not much of a problem in a Southerly would there be enough room to swing with 1.4m twin keels?

 

[Jomo]

would there be enough room to swing with 1.4m twin keels?
[\quote]

or even 1.45m single ?

 

[pks1702]

Thanks for taking the trouble to put that together and post.

Horrible place the East Coast isn't it!

Nothing wrong with the music BTW

 

[Marmalade]

Can you stay afloat in Blakeney or does it dry?

 

[stchristopher]

Depth at low water was 2.1m and we were on neaps at the time. In hindsight we would should have anchored a bit nearer the beach as we swung a little nearer the reef than we preferred. So on neaps and settled weather a keel depth of 1.45 should be absolutley fine.

I think Blakeney does dry. Charlie Ward (boat builder, Morston) who owns the sailing barge juno, kindly rented us a mooring and said that we should have 12" at low water. This was a mooring right in the middle of the "pit" but you can see from below we grounded.