Yesterday M/V* Eowyn made her way across the Thames Estuary. The most notable features of the trip were sand banks, tides, the lack of wind ... and wind farms. There were wind farms everywhere.

*M/V = Motor Vessel, cf. S/V=Sailing Vessel

I had to "sail" pretty close to one of them - Knock Deep. Up close these structures are very impressive, and to me strangely beautiful.


Crossing the Thames Estuary is not trivial navigationally. There are lots of sand banks, typical of a major estuary. There are also lots of ships, big ones, that you have to dodge. And there are tides, strong ones, that you want to go with rather than against. My little vessel can manage about 5 knots under power comfortably; yesterday I frequently saw 8-9kts. As you'll appreciate, if I'd got the tides wrong that would have been 1kt!

With thanks to my former colleague and friend Bertrand Theuveny for pointing out Vessel Finder to me, here's an image of yesterday's track superimposed on the navigational chart.



The green bits are sand that dries out at lowest tide - you have to miss those bits! The magenta lines show shipping routes and other such complications.

If you want to see the latest position of Eowyn, use the "Where is Eowyn?" link on the right (under "Links" at the bottom). When on the VesselFinder site, the zig-zag folded paper icon on the right gives you a choice of back ground maps: use the "Navionics Map" to get the navigation chart. I've tried to make this the default, but haven't figures that out - if you do, let me know!

And while I'm on the topic of links, take note also of the "Photo Album" link. This takes you to my public iCloud album, where I'm posting photos from the trip. These are higher resolution than the blog site allows. Unfortunately, Apple are a bit limited in what I can do with the album: although the photos have titles and captions in my private album, those don't seem to show up in the public one. I also have a setting to be notified if you like or comment on a photo, but quite how you do that isn't obvious to me.

To finish off this longer than usual post, here's the sky as I was approaching Harwich last night: fearful raincloud and rainbow out to sea, and beautiful sunset over the land. I got my full oilskins on just in case, and they worked well - it didn't rain!






PS: I figured out how to get captions to appear on the photo album, and I've added a bonus - an animation of my track so far.

PPS: if you don't see images embedded in this post, just boxes with names of the image in them, sorry! Some browsers don't seem to show the linked images. But you can see them if you follow the "Photo Album" link on the right.

Log of this passage