From Dawn to Dusk At Calshot Spit & A Whole New Blogger Icon For Me

Ever wanted to see the back of yourself? I mean…everybody else has, at some time or another. Some have probably even made a few unseen and rudely colourful gestures behind your back, when you’ve trodden on their sweeties in the past. Chances are, one of the few people you can really truly trust to watch your own back for you, when the chips are down and dirty is…you. Trouble is, you’re the only one who has to content yourself with doing it in the figurative and not the physical. There’s a paradox lurking in their somewhere, I just heard it scuttle behind my back.

Here’s me and my shadow playing around just after dawn together then, outside the castle walls. We would have got up close and personal for you (kinky eh) but there’s a big moat full of seawater keeping a safe & some thirty feet of distance between us, just out of sight here. Otherwise there might have been quite a riot. Imagine – ‘Man being questioned by police today after dawn raid, for chasing his shadow around castle walls in suspicious circumstances. His shadow has now been reported as officially missing, presumed drowned’

I wish. Now that would be a story worth selling to News International. ‘World Exclusive: Serial shadow stalker suspected of drowning his own shadow. Police looking for witnesses.’

Moving on then – In truth, this is not exactly headline material. It’s simply me capturing me from behind, just after sunrise one morning a while back, whilst waiting for a bunch of clouds to smooch into place just behind me to the east and thus into the early morning sunlight. I am stood on top of the old, outer moat ramparts that encircle the Napoleonic gun tower, which is rather euphemistically called ‘Calshot Castle’ – sitting sentry on the southwest most corner, of the shipping channels, that signal the gateway between ‘The Solent’ and ‘Southampton Water,’ in central Hampshire’s busy sailing coastline.

I got quite caught up for a few minutes adopting various silly poses with my new game here and my shadow reaching out with a posy of wild flowers, plucked straight from the castle walls. Clearly my shadow was trying to appeal to my feminine side for a moment there, cos I've got to admit, I was quite touched. Hmmm (?)  (!)

Needless to say I banged them all (the images) into Photoshop and started messing about with different interpretations’, one of which I’ve turned into a ‘Thank You’ card (that's the one with me holding out the posy of flowers – blokes!) and then more recently, the abstract coloured versions I’ve now adopted for use as my new blogger header flag and blog icon. So there it is. Now you know. Bish Bosh Bashy rides off into the sunset again then, to boldly go where no normal mortal shadow has ever gone before.

In the ‘blue dawn’ set of three images above, the one on the left shows the early morning, high speed, jet boat, catamaran ferry making its first run of the day across to Cowes on the Isle of Wight with Calshot Castle on the right of picture. The middle image is a local lobster boat on his way to the best place to drop his cages for the day, and the right hand pic shows the RNLI watch station with the imposing NCI Observatory watch tower looming up behind. Behind the rising sun, just out of sight is Portsmouth, home to the Royal Navy, and a couple of months further on still, by camel, is….Mecca itself.       Inshallah.

The greeny toned image above is the shot I was waiting to eventually capture, while I'd become otherwise boyishly distracted, being a complete and utter muppet for a few minutes here, skylarking around with my shadow. Just as I was beginning to get bored again, the cloud formation I'd been patiently waiting for, kindly cruised into play to make the whole scene look a bit more interesting and moody for a few seconds, and so I whistled up my pet gull ‘Gary’ there to swoop down into view, right on cue, as you do do doo, and thus managed to snap this particular picture.

The liner coming into view is the ‘Aurora’ returning from another Caribbean Cruise…in the Carbbean. No really, I’m not making all this up. It really is a Caribbean cruise liner that cruises around the Caribbean quite a lot. I correctly and diligently read all my junk mail. Always. Amazing what I've learned.


Personally, I‘ve never been the slightest bit attracted to taking a cruise on a great big metal and plastic floating hotel like this. The notion just doesn’t float my boat, what-so-ever. Packed in with all those mobs of 'cruisers' in their assortments of evening party frocks and war painted faces, to keep all the evil spirits away. Me?...well I’d be leaping over the side at the first sign of a port, and take my chance with all the nice sharkey warky's, as I made my bid for freedom.

Facing east towards Mecca again at low tide last Sunday morning around 6.00am, looking past the huge public slipway in the foreground to the RNLI station with its jetty, the NCI watch tower just behind and a bit of Calshot Castle itself on the right there.

In a couple of hours time, this slipway becomes full of jet ski trailers, speed boats, day boats, multiple canoe trailers  race dingy's, fast cat sailors, man boys, excited kids and mad dogs, all trying to hurl their floating kit into the water as fast as poss before hurtling off round to the right behind the RNLI station, heading south out into the Solent and beyond to Cowes and the Isle of Wight for a spot of lunch. The weekenders as they are called, who camp out in all forms of tent, truck and camper vans at the other end of the Spit grassland nearby. 

Even though I live just inland up the road from here, I always know they're up to their mischief by the constant cacophony of ships horns trumpeting their warnings and later, their wrath, as the constant flotillas of dense and often well lubricated day sailors weave and meander their hopelessly oblivious ways, back and forth, right under the bowsprits of the ocean going leviathans that have been steaming  the major shipping lanes here for the last hundred years and beyond.

No matter how many times I come here, I’m always drawn to the amazing contrasts of the light and shadows, given off by the iron jetty. It’s a living structure, like a chameleon, its plethora of surface textures, constantly altering and re-morphing as the sunlight follows its intrepid arc, and the perpetually undulating waves, send their shimmers of light motion, sparkling and twinkling at random, as they slosh and sluice there way through all the seaweed and barnacle coated sections of this charismatic old iron structure.

These four remaining jetty images have all been taken at dusk. The image immediately below was captured last Saturday evening around 9.00pm. As you look up through the right hand side of this image, you are in fact gazing towards Southampton Docks about five mile north in the distance. When my twenty something son & daughter set off to go to the Isle of Wight music festival each summer, this is the jetty they depart from in a friends inflatable rib. 


It's by far and above the coolest way to arrive at the huge, festival grounds, which themselves are a good few miles up the river Medina on the edge of Newport, in the center of the Island. There is a corresponding jetty at the festival park itself, which allows small craft to drop off local festival goers and thus tramp directly into the camping areas, while the rest of the masses have to laboriously trapes their way across to the Island, via all the main car ferries to Cowes and Ryde, before bussing their equally laborious ways inland to Newport, thence having to hike it with all their kit, for a good couple of miles to the festivals main entrances. Not a lot of fun when your'e carrying all your camping dross, and a five days supply of essential life enhancing beer and alcohol, I can tell you (!!!)

It always becomes a very special moment for me once I've helped offload them both and all their rucksack kit into the rib, along with their immediate friends, as I cast them off with a big wave of the hand, cupping my hands to my mouth and yelling after them.. "Drink plenty of water! Keep putting the suncream on! Try and eat something solid every day! Send me a text when you land in Newport!! Have fun!!! as their rib pilot guns the engines to leave a broiling, foaming squirrels tail of heaving white water in his wake, and I'm left staring impotently after my two special raison d'etres grinning mightily back at me, each with a mocking hand cupped up to an ear mouthing a perfectly translatable "Whattt? I can't hear you anymore Daaaddd..." - their fast inflatable sea taxi becoming quickly smaller and quieter as it romps, judders and dances its eager way across the mornings gentle swells, fading softly from clear sight, into post dawns hazy glare.

The buggers!!   

My special moment - which always lasts until I've watched them through my binoculars enter Cowes harbour a couple of miles due south of here - is a mixture of pride and warm envy for them and their oncoming music festival adventure, a powerful rush of personal reflection and past images of all the mischief and adventures I've enjoyed myself from this very jetty since I was a mere mid teens boy, and an enormous sense of gratitude that we've all been so bloody privileged to live so close to this place at all. We lucky few.

Sochi-Russia-A-man-dives - courtesy Daily Telegraph.

I came across this incredible photo image the other day on the Telegraph's website. Boy would I have been a happy bunny to have nailed this one. It entirely captures the essence of exactly what we used to do as boys off Calshot jetty here during hot and balmy southern evenings in times gone past. A good picture paints a thousand words, and non better than this momentous shot. Salut to you then Mr Ruskie photographer, whoever and wherever you are!

http://flic.kr/p/7mkcqZ

Here you go then, a bit of aerial perspective. This is a great shot of the whole of Calshot Spit as it juts out from the south east corner of the New Forest along Hampshire's central southern shoreline. Figure 'A' denotes precisely where I was stood at dawn when I took my shadow shots above and the green toned image just after sunrise. You can clearly see the water filled circular moat that rings the Castle itself. 

Figure 'B' merely points to the jetty which features in the various images above. The huge big hangar, was originally constructed to house the massive Sunderland Flying boats which were based here before and after WW2. Nowadays, the hangar is host to a truly outstanding indoor and outdoor activity centre owned by Hampshire County Council, and housing a dry ski run, world class climbing faces, national indoor banked cycledrome circuit, shooting galleries, archery course and a great, long integral pub at the back, with an outdoor terrace looking directly out across the Solent towards Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight.

The long dark blob of a building up on the right of picture near the beginning of The Spit, is the dormitory block that I used to stay in as a boy, and became the de facto international battledrome to this planets most epic of all pillow fight wars, which we would stage every single night without fail, ranging up and down along both floors of the building until no boy was left standing. Thee, most, indescribable fun...ever! I can still hear the ghosts of us all, every time I drive past this place, howling and cackling ourselves to total exhaustion, and all the dull whumps and thuds as we pelted and belted each other, every which way, all the way to Mars. The stuff of boyhood legend.

These two smaller maps are just something I did off Google Earth to give those of you who live in a more distant corner of the Bloggasphere, a bit of perspective as to where Calshot actually is in the greater scheme of the UK's coastline and such things.

I've just finished putting together my first YouTube slideshow video of a selection of images taken of the area, mostly captured along the coastline between Hythe on Southampton Water and Beaulieu River, further on round to the west, where it flows quietly into The Solent. Here then is the direct link to the YouTube page itself:
 http://youtu.be/GxYP7MydkfE

That's it then, for now. Joo know? ... this is not the originally intended post I spent all day Saturday trying to write, and after a couple of thousand words I just exasperatedly, tossed it back into my PC's drafts dungeon and went on out to Calshot here to get some necessary fresh air. That makes about fourteen assorted blog posts sitting in my 'future blog post' folder that have yet to see the light of day, for one reason or another. I'm absolutely hopeless aren't I. Absolutely hopeless.

The Fireworks Display at Cowes on the Island a couple of miles away due south of Calshot, which signifies the end of the annual International Sailing Regatta. This years display will take place next Friday...the 13th! Kaboom time then. Not a particularly good image I'm afraid. I only had a baby lens with me, and I couldn't see my camera on the beach in front of me. Duhh!

Right...next time round, I'm going to finish my 'G&T' postette. Guaranteed and promise!

Talking of which...I've just noticed, I've run out.

Bollocks!!