Batten down the hatches

This time I got two phone calls back-to-back from the Environment Agency's autodialler: a flood alert for Fareham to Portchester, and a flood warning for Fareham specifically. The gist of it from their emails is:

Sunday afternoon's tide at 12:30 on 29/09/2019 is higher than normal due to unsettled weather with strong South Westerly Force 7 winds and large waves. The weather increases tide table values by 0.3 m (surge). The forecast tide is 5.38 metres Chart Datum (2.65 mAOD) at Portsmouth. For 1 hour either side of high water, the tide will exceed the top of the slipway at Lower Quay, flooding a small number of properties. The road, at Wallington Shore Road, will also flood. Until Tuesday (01/10/2019)‚ tides are high enough to cause minor impacts at each high water. The largest impacts will occur on this tide.

Probably not quite enough for me to have a moat, but it'll be close...

Coastal karting!

It's not my birthday, but that's not going to stop the pasta nighters making an outing to Teamsport's Gosport go-kart track!

With just the five of us (plus two others who'd booked the same session) we didn't have enough for a grid start and so just did a pair of 15min open timed sessions. This is our fourth outing to this track, and the second one since they changed the layout a few years back. I'm still undecided over the change - the previous layout had a much better run-up to the bridge and a wider corner off it at the end, but the new one has more variation to it. I'm still struggling to work out the best line to take before and after the bridge with the new layout.

I came 5th fastest in each session which I'm happy with (best lap 34.592s in the first session, 34.251s in the second). In both sessions my average time wasn't particularly good, but that's not helped by pitting in the first session to fix the pedal adjustment (they slipped back as soon as I pushed them!) and several spins in the second session as I experimented with lines. I can at least claim none of my spins resulted in a yellow or red flag! The second session had some particularly good moments - while Jonners did lap me, I managed to keep pace with him for the following lap. Then right at the end he passed me again just before the bridge... only for me to take the place back as I got a better line up onto the bridge. Go me!