Words and pictures - John Lymer

A Club trip 6th July 2025 ...

We arrived all full of anticipation. We left satisfied. Fleetwood always has that effect! As long as you’re a windsurfer, that is. You’d probably be disappointed as a day tripper. It’s way down the league of best beach resorts to visit. Happily though, that’s not us!

Here's the Strava plot from my smart watch ...

We sail in the channel to the North of the mouth of the River Wyre. The West of the channel is bounded by mussel beds and the East by a sand bar. Westerly or Easterly winds are best. Today was originally forecast Force 6 Westerly. That changed to F4 - 5 WNW’ly. Then the Met Office eventually predicted a NW’ly. On the day, that’s what we got. Maybe we should have gone on Saturday, but you can’t always have it perfect and different forecasts never agree! NW’ly makes for reaches of a quarter of a mile. That’s fine, but in the best direction you can sail straight out to sea for 2 miles … and then get off and stand on the sand bar! Low tide exposes the mussel beds and sand bar which makes for flat water and clean wind in between. Today’s NW’ly made for choppy conditions, but not rough. It certainly gave me plenty of gybe practice but I covered 22 miles in 2 hours, which is none too shabby. To start, we worked our way upwind until we were about 1 to 1.25 miles out.

A kite surfer arrived soon after us and stayed closer to shore. He was eventually joined by 2 wing foilers who ventured further out. It seems a bit brave to foil at Fleetwood. I always catch my fin on the bottom somewhere and today was no exception. Not so bad if it’s the sandy bottom, but if you hit the rocky mussel beds (I did!) a swift dismount follows and you get some dents in the front of the fin! A helmet and impact vest can be a good idea for that reason, though I always wear them anywhere on the sea. Maybe the wing foilers really know which parts of the channel area to avoid? Or maybe they pick the neap tides - when high tides are not very high and low tides not very low? Today’s low tide was 3.1m on the Liverpool Tide Tables – low tides vary between 0.5 and 3.9m – so definitely a neap.

There are no windsurfing action in the photos because we came off together ...