Seal Safari - Full Day Tour

Emsworth is a beautiful starting point - a quiet harbour village with sailing boats bobbing at their moorings and wading birds picking along the shore. We launch about two and a half hours before low tide, which means the harbour gradually reveals its secrets as the water drops - mudflats emerge, channels narrow and the wildlife moves closer.

The route takes us through parts of Chichester Harbour that the shorter tours don't reach. We paddle through narrow creeks where the banks are close enough to touch, past saltmarsh islands where terns nest in summer and out into the wider channels where the harbour opens up. It's a journey of contrasts - intimate one minute, expansive the next.

We stop for lunch on a quiet stretch of shore, usually a sandbank or slipway that appears at low tide and disappears again a few hours later. Then it's on to the seal colony, where we'll spend time watching the seals before the rising tide picks us up and carries us back the way we came. The return is noticeably easier as the tide does the work and you cruise home feeling like the harbour is giving you a lift. Around 15km of paddling, a packed lunch with a view and seals. A day out that's hard to beat.