Bembridge put-in

Bembridge Harbour is what remains of the much larger Brading Haven, an estuary that once reached three kilometres inland with its own quay near Brading. A series of sea walls narrowed it over the centuries, and the 1879 embankment carrying Embankment Road and the old railway across the estuary mouth cut it down to about a fifth of its original extent. What survives is a largely drying lagoon of intertidal mudflats, sand flats and open water covering roughly 81 hectares, reached from the Solent through a dredged, buoyed channel over a shifting sand bar. Two dune systems either side of the entrance, St Helens Duver and Bembridge Point, shelter the harbour mouth from the worst of northerly storms, and a band of Bembridge limestone outcrops on the northern edge of the outer harbour.

From the water, the line of houseboats along Embankment Road is a fixture of the harbour, including a derelict Second World War motor torpedo boat among them; further along sit the Fishermans Pontoon and its floating seafood cafe, and the jetties of the harbour's two yacht clubs and marinas. Upstream, to the west and south, the channel gives way to the RSPB's Brading Marshes reserve on the reclaimed floodplain of the Eastern Yar. Downstream, the buoyed channel threads past a drying beach anchorage inside Bembridge Point and out over the bar towards the Solent, with the smallest of the Solent forts, St Helens Fort, visible beyond the entrance. Much of the harbour bed is soft intertidal mud, which local houseboat operators warn is deep and can be dangerous underfoot; firmer sand lies on the beach just inside the entrance, in front of Bembridge Sailing Club.

The mudflats support internationally important numbers of wintering and migratory waterfowl: dark-bellied Brent geese graze the harbour's eelgrass beds in their hundreds through the winter, and the intertidal flats also draw oystercatcher, dunlin, black-tailed godwit, curlew, redshank, grebes, mergansers, grey herons and little egrets. The harbour mouth also functions as a nursery for bass.