The middle part of our holiday on the Isle of Wight was hot, in the high twenties, which is hot for us - although not as hot as London was as about the same time. This indicated plenty of time at Ryde, where the beach is north facing and the esplanade comes with plenty of benches and plenty of trees. Parking either on the esplanade itself (upper orange spot) or at Puckpool Park - once a fort, part of the defences ringing Portsmouth - a little to the east.
When it cooled down a bit, it was Yaverland (lower orange spot), the place with the rock cakes, to walk east under the cliffs or west along the Sandown esplanade.
With Ryde/Puckpool doing slightly better than Yaverland/Sandown at 5 visits to 4, although there is room for argument about what exactly counts as a visit. Whole day, part day or passing through? The record is not up counting up the hours - although I suppose that in principle, that might be recovered from the telephone company records. Do they keep that kind of stuff, just in case the the police want to take a look?
Which prompts me to ask Gemini, who provides lots of information, very plausible but not checked. The story seems to be that while my telephone is turned on - which is pretty much all the time - O2 will be logging which tower I am connected to. In principle, this information could be used to reconstruct my movements, but it would be a bit patchy, not very accurate and more or less inaccessible to me. On the other hand, Google maps includes a tracking feature which, if turned on, might give me the sort of data needed to analyse visit durations. Maybe I will investigate later today.
In the meantime, a few snippets from our time on or near beaches follow. Mostly with the tide well out, looking rather spectacular under the bright, blue sky.
On just one day, there were a few small jellyfish on the beach at Ryde. Up to around two inches across. We spotted a very small amount of what I took to be sand eel action - that is to say the animals responsible for the tubes of sand in the snap above. Not being quite sure about this, I ask Wikipedia today, which does not look quite right, so I ask Google Images, who puts me right with lugworms. Some beaches can be rather spoiled by the unsightly heaps of sand left by anglers who dig them up for bait for sea fishing - although that was not a serious problem on this particular occasion. From where I associate to the many spoil heaps from the mines of old in the otherwise scenic parts of the Lake District. But for eels and worms, see references 5 and 6.
A curious lump of conglomerate from the same visit. Built on some stray lump of ironwork?
Looking towards Ryde. Appley Tower visible left. A small folly without mains services, which once housed a rock and fossil shop. There were arty people with ambitions last year, for which see reference 7, but this year we seem to have people offering immersive sound experiences. Presumably therapeutic, but BH was not tempted.
Looking towards the red cliff at Yaverland. I think that it is getting smaller, but that may be more a matter of expectations rather than fact.
Some lurking rocks for the careless - or unlucky - swimmer.
A curious bit of rock. Where do the little saucers, the little bumps come from?
Gemini suggests ironstone concretions, on which clue Bing turns up the image above. He also turns up a lot of images which bring to mind the stone balls of Aberdeen of reference 8. An angle to be checked out in due course.
I occurred to me to trying steaking my rock, which was very definitely yellow despite the red appearance, particularly when still a bit wet. Gemini thought that this was further confirmation of his original diagnosis. All to do with the mixture to hand of Goethite and Hematite, with the former streaking yellow and the latter streaking red.
A reasonably busy Sunday for the main beach at Sandown. But the day before it had been hot and heaving: we had never seen it so busy before. And for small girls, the swimming aid of choice was an inflatable tyre done up as a white unicorn with appropriate trimmings. But I failed to snap one.
Like Ryde, Sandown is clearly working quite hard to come back as a resort, to do something about the remnants of its former glory. But for us, getting on in years, they need to do something about the supply of public conveniences. The big facilities of the past have been closed - but not enough of them have been replaced.
The harbour end of Ryde. Complete with pier which serves the car ferries from Portsmouth. Complete with the Pier Head Station, the Ryde terminus of the Island Line, which we failed to use this holiday, despite there being a station at Brading. For which see reference 9.
We crept under the pier, complete with signs saying no entry, which we thought was to do with the fact that there was renovation work in progress, involving scows, off snap to the left.
To wind up on the apron of the hoverport, which was surely forbidden. Not wanting to be anywhere near when one of these ferries got underway, we rapidly sneaked up the apron onto dry land. I might say that these ferries make a great deal of noise, which I thought I heard at times from Brading, some miles away.
The naval option. Maybe they are into stealth.
Striking clouds to the north. Portsmouth's Spinnaker Tower, just about visible lower right.
Our last visit to the cliffs of Yaverland, looking towards Shanklin.
A fine sand castle, just above the tide line and left over from the day before. There were several of them, so there may have been a bit of competition among the dads. Maybe serious to the point of cheating, to using serious spades rather than little plastic ones.
My own taste in sand castles ran more to waterworks, with lots of ponds and channels, rather than castles. Although I did, on occasion, go in for drip castles. I associate to generating a lot of interest doing same, many years ago, on a huge, seemingly near empty beach at Les Sables d'Olonne. French dads seemed to think it a bit undignified for a grown man to be playing with sand, although at least one got competitive when provoked.
At the bottom of Union Street at Ryde, in what the call the Western Gardens. The source of a great deal of twittering, we thought sparrows. Sea behind. Google Images suggests the same New Zealand flax as was noticed at reference 10 and there are hints of the distinctive, tree-like inflorescences.
The sand at Ryde on the morning of our departure (from Fishbourne down the road). Not a lugworm cast or digging to be seen.
PS 1: in the course of asking Bing and Google about Yaverland, once separated from the rest of the island by what is now the eastern Yar, I came across one Rupert Willoughby, whose serious online presence includes a lot of material about the island and a fair bit about Yaverland. See references 2, 3 and 4. A bit more organised than I am.
PS 2: it occurs to me that the likes of Gemini are knocking out lots of the sort of grunt work which used to be done by entry level graduates in offices. When I started, this grunt work would have included spending time with heavy journals and fat reference books in the in-house library, apt at that time to be a serious affair involving professionally qualified librarians. What now are they going to do instead?
References
Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/07/yaverland-one.html.
Reference 4: https://www.rupertwilloughby.co.uk/category/the-isle-of-wight/.
Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_eel.
Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arenicola.
Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/07/ryde.html.
Reference 8: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-carved-stone-balls-of-aberdeen.html.
Reference 9: https://www.southwesternrailway.com/destinations-and-offers/island-line.
Reference 10: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/07/two-visits.html.
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