Scott, wonky lighthouses, and repairs to West Hoe Pier - SOTS Saturday July 11 2026

The Captain has been in Europe since late May, but hopefully normal service will now be resumed.

Plymouth Sound certainly looks wonderful at the moment and one does have to wonder why anyone bothers to brave the European Entry/Exit System - ‘though if you do decide to go, Roscoff may well be the best point to enter.  We were hardly held up at all going in either direction.

Looking out over the Sound, there is no foreign naval activity.  HMS Scott, the ocean survey vessel, has been here after her Service Life Extension Programme in Falmouth, and she should now be fit to continue surveying the deep oceans until 2033.  Let’s hope so, as the deep oceans remain less well charted than the moon is mapped.  She has one of the largest sonar arrays in the world – most of her hull length and only the Americans, as far as we know, can do similar large-scale deep-ocean work. 

MV Mounts Bay has been back around the area after more than a year in regeneration at Falmouth, and half of the RN’s few remaining frigates, HM Ships Somerset, Portland and Sutherland, have been in the Sound this week. 

The one-day running from anchor is HMS Portland – now fully modernised and ‘due’ to be one of the last of the class to leave service – we may see her around for another eight years yet. 

Elsewhere, the King’s Harbour Master has issued a couple of Formal Notices that may affect readers.  Both afternoons this weekend, there will be water ski racing in an area north of the Tamar Bridges (LNTM No 043/26 if you wish to see the details – LNTM = Local Notices to Mariners).   LNTM 044/26 will be more disappointing – as of yesterday Mount Batten beach has been closed because of the discovery of high levels of asbestos fibres in the sand.  The duration of this closure is not yet known. 

Walking along the front, it seems there has been quite a bit of activity in the last six weeks.  The Lido is open and looking wonderful, plus there are now two swimming pontoons anchored to the east.  The poor inhabitants of Rivage are now cocooned in scaffolding as work starts to replace the cladding on their block and work continues to repair – properly this time, it seems – the eastern arm of the West Hoe Harbour.  The crane barge Tavy has been lifting rocks out of the harbour and has now, they think, recovered all of the original rock cladding. 

Beaglers may have wondered why this work has been going on at neaps (when the tidal range is least), because it is not possible to see everything on the bottom when the tide’s in. The answer is that the Tavy draws a couple of metres, and at low water she still has only one metre under her screws.

The other major recent addition to the Hoe (and wider City) area has been the 41 St Luke’s brightly painted lighthouses.  One is always loath to criticise charities, but “why spoil the ship for halfpenny’s worth of tar” – at least two of the local ones aren’t upright, and this offends this seaman’s eye and, I suspect, others too.

Yours aye