DangerousPirate
Active member
So, I have sailed into Preston now. It's less stressful than you'd think. If you arrive at high tide, you see the red/white buoy outside as the marker to get in.
It's quite far out from the other buoys so it takes a bit of motoring/sailing into the channel before you actually see the other markers. I was there 1,5 hours before HW and when I entered, I found the markers don't look like what you'd expect, but once you identified the sides, it was easy to stay in the middle of them. They look like poles in the water. I think they were painted green and red, but with the sun shining right in my face I couldn't make out colours.
At times, the channel felt shallow as even at absolute high tide, you still only had 2 metres under the keel at certain times. Which is okay, it worked out, but if it gets shallower and shallower suddenly, you might get a little scare and think you're in the wrong position even when you're not.
Coming in with a nice 10-12 knots on the beam and in hindsight, I wish I had sailed it. It was the perfect day for it, but I decided against it as I wasn't familiar with the channel and wanted to be ready for any surprises. But there were non. To anyone who wants to do this trip under sail; Do it. You can see everything very well and there is no difficult manoeuvring if you have the winds. Could have sailed right up to the lock quite honestly.
Communication with lock is a bit weird though, they asked me to call them on channel 16 and then had lock operations on that channel instead of switching to another channel, were told off by the coastguard. Not sure what happened there. I have the suspicion, you can just sail straight up and they operate when they see you.
Anyway, you'd need to hail "Riversway" for the lock operation.
Writing this just to conclude the trip for anyone maybe stumbling across this thread in the future; It's way less complicated than it looks once you catch it at high tide.
It's quite far out from the other buoys so it takes a bit of motoring/sailing into the channel before you actually see the other markers. I was there 1,5 hours before HW and when I entered, I found the markers don't look like what you'd expect, but once you identified the sides, it was easy to stay in the middle of them. They look like poles in the water. I think they were painted green and red, but with the sun shining right in my face I couldn't make out colours.
At times, the channel felt shallow as even at absolute high tide, you still only had 2 metres under the keel at certain times. Which is okay, it worked out, but if it gets shallower and shallower suddenly, you might get a little scare and think you're in the wrong position even when you're not.
Coming in with a nice 10-12 knots on the beam and in hindsight, I wish I had sailed it. It was the perfect day for it, but I decided against it as I wasn't familiar with the channel and wanted to be ready for any surprises. But there were non. To anyone who wants to do this trip under sail; Do it. You can see everything very well and there is no difficult manoeuvring if you have the winds. Could have sailed right up to the lock quite honestly.
Communication with lock is a bit weird though, they asked me to call them on channel 16 and then had lock operations on that channel instead of switching to another channel, were told off by the coastguard. Not sure what happened there. I have the suspicion, you can just sail straight up and they operate when they see you.
Anyway, you'd need to hail "Riversway" for the lock operation.
Writing this just to conclude the trip for anyone maybe stumbling across this thread in the future; It's way less complicated than it looks once you catch it at high tide.
