View those impressive-looking off-shore wind turbines close up on these wind farm tours! These fun and unusual boat trips will see you touring the Brighton wind farm, with an experienced skipper at the helm to tell you all about this incredible feat of modern engineering.
It's all about harnessing the power of the wind and using it to create electricity. No dodgy nuclear reactions, no burning non-renewable fossil fuels, just the immense three-bladed turbines way out to sea, turning, turning, turning. These shared or private Brighton tours allow you to explore what this amazing wind farm is all about.
Onboard the 38ft South Boats catamaran 'Brighton Diver II', you head out from Brighton Marina to around nine miles off-shore, where the wind farm starts. It covers an impressive 72 square kilometres of sea and stretches 28kms east to west and 10kms from north to south. In total, there are 161 of these huge metal windmills rising 140m high out of the sea.
The very first turbine of this £1.3 billion project went up back in March 2017. Since then, workers have averaged one windmill being constructed per day on this farm. Once the base is ready, it takes five separate lifts using a very special boat to build the turbines with the tower, the cell and each of the three blades being hauled up and into place. Equally impressive is the 2000-tonne off-shore sub-station installed as part of the wind farm.
As you can probably tell, this is renewable energy on a massive scale, making Brighton's wind farm one of the largest in England. These tours allow you to get up close to the structures, so you can see just how massive they really are and listen to the noise they make as they turn.
And if you're wondering how the installation got the name of Rampion Wind Farm, it was a naming competition won by a local school. The rampion flower is the floral emblem of Sussex. You'll hear about these facts and a whole load more from your skipper Paul, during your two to three-hour wind farm tour, with a return trip back to the marina via Brighton seafront to round off your expedition on the sea.
