Very occasionally I watch Michael Portillo’s Great Railway Journeys and earlier in the week he was travelling from Norfolk down to Dorset, with a stop on the Isle of Wight on the hovercraft. I immediately wanted to have a go and fortunately, I live within easy driving distance of Southsea so I went.
I’ve been on hovercraft before. I assume, although I don’t remember, that we used it when I first went to the Isle of Wight, aged eight or nine. We definitely used to use the big ones to go to France for camping holidays before the Channel Tunnel opened, also when I was eight or nine but I remember almost nothing of it.
So I wanted to try this one. It’s the only passenger hovercraft operating in Europe. Or the world. It depends what you read, but a quick Google search (admittedly in English only, for obvious reasons) isn’t coming up with anything else, although it has provided me with a link to buy the used Isle of Wight hovercrafts – price on request. They were popular a few decades ago but they’re too expensive, too inefficient, too uncomfortable and too noisy to be commercially viable in the twenty-first century.
Good fun though.
At 8:30, even on the hot Saturday morning of a bank holiday weekend, the hovercraft was almost empty. There are two seats along each side by the window and four seats in the middle, eight seats wide in all. Most of the window seats were full but there were maybe three people sitting in the 36 middle seats (I counted them on the safety sticker). I was booked on the 9:30 flight but I took my mum’s warnings about how long it would take to get to Southsea too seriously and I was parked and standing outside the terminal at quarter past eight in the morning and the staff were nice enough to let me get an earlier flight. Well, there was plenty of room.
Two hatches open in the nose so you walk straight in and find a seat. A window seat, obviously. I was doing this entire trip simply for the joy of the hovercraft and I wanted to see the flight properly. There are no allocated seats. it’s first come first served.
First, the fans go on. That wasn’t as loud as I was expecting and it certainly didn’t vibrate as much as I was expecting. It was quieter than the average plane and certainly quieter than Flybe’s Dash 8 propeller planes. It didn’t vibrate either. Yeah, it was a bit like being on a quiet plane. Then it lifts up, which feels a bit weird. And then it starts moving and that feels like nothing on Earth.
The hovercraft glides over the concrete-and-sand landing pad and onto the water and you can’t feel the difference. From the window, you can see the sea flying by at a speed the sea should not be capable of flying by at but you can’t feel it. I’ve taken to the water in a lot of different craft and every single one of them moves by moving the water. You can always feel it. You always go up and down a certain amount. But not the hovercraft because you’re not in the water. You’re hovering above it. I’d be interested to know what it feels like on choppy water – do you bump over the top of the waves? – but it was smooth as glass both ways for me. There’s a deep hum behind you and the water moving at ludicrous speed and that’s it.
Less than ten minutes later, Ryde Pier came alongside and then we dropped our speed a bit to glide onto the sand-and-concrete landing pad at the other side, the hum getting a bit deeper as it takes a little more effort to push up the slope than it does to fly over the water. The fans slowed and then went off and the hovercraft slowly lowered us back down. And that was it. Like on a plane, everyone stood up and stood in the aisle to wait for the doors to open and we disembarked through the nose straight onto the concrete and out through the open fence.
It takes Hovertravel less than four minutes to empty the ferry and refill it and then the engines go on and it flies off again. It really can keep up a schedule of a crossing in opposite directions every fifteen minutes. There are a lot of airlines that can learn a lot from their changeover.
What’s really exciting is sitting on the harbour wall at Ryde to watch a hovercraft go out. They travel nose-first so they turn round on the launchpad to jump forwards into the water and if you’re sitting on the wall to the port side of the big blow-up boat, it’s going to turn its fans in your direction and that’s quite something to experience. Any junk on the beach is blown in your direction, by which I mostly mean sand and water and a huge wall of noise and wind. Some kids who were also watching shrieked and even I said something ridiculous like “Yeep!” as I realised this might not be the brightest idea I’d had all day. It turned and buzzed off into the water and I watched until it disappeared into the sunset towards Portsmouth.
The whole thing is great fun. Ok, you can’t take your car but that didn’t bother me. I bought a day ticket for the buses and I also had a joyride on the Island Line train but I did need my car when I came in November 2015, when everything was closed and bleak and miserable and I came on the conventional ferry from Lymington, because it’s the shortest crossing.
I’ll be coming back again. Probably not until next May or June at the earliest but I would very much like to have another ride on the hovercraft. Oh, and you know what I particularly appreciated? I got a certificate for simply flying across the Solent. And that’s great!
Watch my Isle of Wight vlog (First vlog I’ve ever made!)