After a rough night out in Portsmouth, our bad planning was exposed from the off as we didn’t start at the pier furthest east. “Fail to consult a map” is a new mission statement for pier2pier and has necessitated relying on directions from chip eating pensioners.

Southsea Clarence failed to impress on one fundamental point; it was closed. Whilst it can be argued that this was not entirely the fault of “Southsea Clarence”, a radio commitment to Power FM insisting we start at 8.00 am, one fact cannot be ignored….. it extends the wrong way.

Heroes: A random bloke gives us a tenner, top work fella!

Villains: Richard Banks secretly tells Power Fm that Tim likes to be introduced as Tiger Tim. 45,000 people hear about “Jason Gould and Tiger Tim taking on Britain’s Piers”.

While the Pier2Pier team were jumping out of bed at 6.30 am and making it happen, Southsea Town was clearly hitting the snooze button. Like it’s westerly sibling, it too was closed, it was, however, still possible to make it to the end of the pier. Here we were confronted with several posters alerting us to the cautionary tale of Jason (I can jump off the pier) Mullet. Poor Mr Mullet paid the price of trying to wake up Southsea and broke his neck in the process. Tim spends an unusually long period of silence contemplating Jason’s fate, Birdman suddenly inherits an ingredient of danger.

Heroes: Stella from Power FM. Stella spends the day pretending she thinks what we’re doing is exciting, cool and worthy. Good work Stella!

Villains: Parking Attendants A49 and A59 give our Power FM support team parking tickets. We have now started a Pier2Pier S**t list. They’re at the top.

The journey to the IOW was notable on only one point, a middle aged couple from Essex grabbed us by the throats and bored us senseless. Conversation highlights:
1) She likes London because the air pollution keeps London temperatures on average 2 degrees higher than the rest of the UK
2) He once talked his friend out of jumping off a pier in Blackpool.

Ryde Pier is a working pier. If it had another job, it would be manufacturing plastic medicine spoons or mopping something up. It’s profile in the world of p2p suffered further from a low point when Tim dropped his wing commander moustache off the pier. Even a man in a cowboy jacket wishing us good luck in a dodgy boozer didn’t lift our spirits. Time to walk to Sandown.

Heroes: Helen from Power FM who defied a court order not to collect money on the Isle of Wight.

Villians: Dithering man from the ferry company who couldn’t summon up enough energy to take our photo for us. Not quite s**t list.

Pier Score: 0 out of 10

Sandown

Sandown was the first pier of our trip to be open and ready for fun. Tim fed his lifelong gaming addiction while Jason perused the pier concluding that it was ‘great value for all the family’. We irritated some fisherman by loitering at the end of the pier scaring fish. On our walk back down, a man claimed to have heard of us. We didn’t believe him

Heros: The folks at the Trouville Hotel, who were so excited by our challenge that they let us stay for free.

Villians: The staff at the George pub who refused to look us in the eye while serving us. They clearly don’t like “mainlanders” in this neck of the woods.

Pier Score: 4 out of 10