Weymouth Carnival finishes with a bang

The victorious Team GB sailing team

At six o'clock we walked down to the Esplanade and joined thousands of spectators lining the street under a cloudless blue sky to watch the annual Weymouth Carnival; the largest on the south coast. The entire Team GB sailing team had returned to Weymouth for a victory ride in an open-topped bus along the carnival route. You can just see Ben Ainslie with his gold medal at the back of this picture.

After the disastrous start to the day when the Red Devils were cancelled and the scheduled WWII memorial flight was reduced to just one Lancaster bomber, the clouds disappeared around lunchtime and the sun shone for the rest of the day. It was still breezy though, and with gales forecast for the evening, our planned cruise into Weymouth Bay to have fish and chips and watch the end-of-carnival fireworks with other local members of the Federation of Small Businesses (of which I am a member) was also cancelled.

The carnival parade itself was quite impressive. The participants had obviously gone to a lot of trouble prepareing their floats and, rather sensibly I thought, the parade stopped every hundred metres or so, so that the bands, dance groups and club members could put on a short performance for the spectators before moving on. The parade lasted about an hour, by which time we were starving and went to find something to eat. Not so easy... everyone else was doing the same!

In the end we ended up at the Nothe Tavern where we had a huge fish and chips. A little later, we were followed in by some characters dressed up as Victorian soldiers who had been in the carnival procession. They were from the Nothe Fort which dates from the 1870s and is one of  the 'Palmerston Forts' built to protect the south coast from invasion. They have a 'Victorian' weekend at the fort in a few days' time, so more of that later!

A little later we were outside again, at the top of the hill behind our house, watching the fireworks down in the bay concluding the carnival celebrations.