Jetskis, powerboats, barrels.. and food

Sunday 16th September was an eventful day for several reasons; not all of them good. Around midday we set off towards Weymouth Pavilion where the Wessex Food Festival was taking place. Along the way we passed the tall ship Pelican of London which will soon be heading off on a journey to the Antarctic as the support ship for modern-day explorer Tim Jarvis’s attempted re-enactment of Ernest Shackleton’s epic journey across ice and mountains for help. See here for more details. Next along the harbour were moored the maritime equivalent of Formula 1 cars; high speed power boats gathered for the afternoon's P1 Superstock championships final race of the season.

In the Pavilion we squeezed our way into the already packed room filled with purveyors of Dorset apple cake and cider, buns, pies and cakes of all kinds, cheese and wine, beer and pickles, sweets and treats and few gadgets, too. We even saw a kitchen designer who we invited to come and give a quote on replacing our kitchen. For lunch I selected a rather unusual heart-shaped vegetarian patty made of grated beetroot and carrots and some other ingredients I can’t remember now. It was very tasty. Ian had rather scrummy-looking sausage roll and a cherry tart. We went outside to eat these and watched jet-ski racers competing in the final of the P1 AquaX Championship being held a little while before the aforementioned Superstock race. Whilst they were getting into place on the course (marked with buoys) in Weymouth Bay a jet-ski stunt rider entertained us with some very daring manoeuvres, including a complete mid-air 360-degree flip.

After lunch we walked into the town centre to do a bit of shopping. A little later, realising that the Powerboat race that he was keen to see had just started Ian went back to the Pavilion and I stayed on and browsed for a while. About 15 minutes later I headed off to join Ian and near the Pavilion it became apparent that something bad had happened, as the local air ambulance had landed on the beach and another helicopter was hovering nearby. Unfortunately, one of the powerboats in the race had hit the wake of another boat and flipped over, tipping out its two occupants at high speed. I’m glad I (or Ian) wasn’t there to see it actually happen. Sadly, the driver later died in hospital but the navigator has made a very good recovery and was discharged on 24th September. A sad end to a memorable sporting summer for Weymouth.

After another visit to the food fair to pick up a bottle of local beer (Corfe Gloriette from the Corfe Castle Brewery), we set off home but were distracted by yet another event on the far side of the harbour. We’d seen some strangely dressed people in open-topped decorated cars and vans had assumed that they were perhaps on a stag or hen do, but when we got over the town bridge we discovered that this was the end of the last leg of the third Dartmoor Barrel Challenge, supporting the MV Freedom (the disability-adapted boat that brought the Paralympic flame to Weymouth) and Help for Heroes.

You would think from looking at these pictures that everyone was dressed as pirates, but there was quite a variety of outfits. See more here. Never a dull moment in Weymouth, that’s for sure.