City of Dubrovnic entering the River Tyne 19.03.2011

At anchor, waiting for the tide ...........

.......... the Tyne pilot boat on its way

......... with the pilot aboard, City of Dubrovnic steers for the entrance to the River Tyne

The Tyne pilot boat, Collingwood returning to port

... followed at a respectful distance by City of Dubrovnic, a cargo ship of 75,460 t dead weight.

.... which will take a lot of careful nudging around the bends in the river, so the tug Svitzer Redbridge... 

.... heads out of the Tyne to meet her ....

... while Svitzer Lyndhurst ....

.... waits in the mouth or the river...

.... and the Yarm Cross waits a little upstream ....

Time to put the brakes on the 75,000t ship so the Svitzer Redbridge heads for her stern ....

.... and the cargo ship slides between the piers.............

.... and as she enters the river the tug is secured to her stern ......

............ ready to slow her down  and haul her stern around ........

... while the other two tugs come alongside to nudge her around the first bend in the river at North Shields..

Building a Dreadnought (?)

This old postcard shows armoured plate being applied to the hull of an Edwardian dreadnought in Portsmouth Dockyard. It's postmarked Portsmouth. The postmark is unclear but could be 1907. It was sent to Miss Alice Tuplin at Holme Cottage, Great Coastes, Lincolnshire by someone called Will, who must have been a ship builder working in the dockyard. His message reads: " Dear Alice, This is the ship I am working on putting on armour plates. Hope you all are well as it leaves me in the pink. With love Will". This might be HMS Bellerophon which was completed in Portsmouth Dockyard in 1909.

There's a four-funnelled cruiser in the background - possibly one of the Cressy class?

Unknown wreck on the Tyne

This wreck lies on the south bank of the River Tyne, about a mile upstream from Newburn. She's about 30 metres long, lying on her starboard side and only fully visible at a low spring tide (this is 11 miles inland, but the river is still tidal here). Anyone have an idea what she was?  A barge of some kind? A Tyne Keel? If she had a mast it must have been hinged, to be able to sail under Newburn bridge.

Starting with a Bang!

When I look back, it seems that there has been one of these on every sea front I have ever walked along, right back to the time when I was a 10 year-old, 50 years ago, walking along the seafront at Southsea with my grandparents. It's a British naval sea sea mine (a 1940 mark XX as far as I can see, from the brass plaque) and ironically this is one of many such weapons of destruction that have been converted for peaceful purposes, as a collecting point for donations to the Shipwrecked Mariner's Society. This one is on the sea front at Sunderland, near the Seaburn lighthouse, and may well have been part of the northern barrage of tens of thousands of mines laid in the North Sea in WW2 to protect east coast shipping. There's an interesting history of British naval minelaying here, more information on mines in general here and a spectacular illustration of their devastating power here.

My grandfather's brother ('Uncle Norman') was a docker in Portsmouth naval dockyard during WW2 and I can recall overhearing him tell the tale of how he had the grisly job of removing bodies of drowned sailors in dry-docked mined ships that had limped back to port, with casualties that had been trapped when water-tight doors had been closed to save the ship. I had nightmares for months after hearing that...