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Displaying items by tag: Thames Shipwreck

On the Thames Estuary and hidden below the waves, reports BBC News, is one of London's most unlikely tourist destinations.

We've travelled about 30 minutes, along with a handful of day trippers from Southend, into the estuary.

Slowly, a set of masts sticking out from the grey waves come into view. This is the SS Richard Montgomery, beached on a sandbank in 1944.

The problem is that the wreck holds 1,400 tonnes of explosives - which could detonate.

The ship is decaying and if the cargo explodes, a huge tidal wave could blast towards the Kent and Essex shorelines and onwards towards the capital.

Richard Bain is from Jetstream Tours, which is seeing an increased interest in trips to see the masts of the SS Richard Montgomery.

For more on the wreck with an exclusion zone around it is located not far from shipping lanes using the Port of London. 

Published in Historic Boats

Almost three weeks ago the massive 'port' explosion which devastated a large swathe of the Lebanese capital Beirut sent shock waves through the world.

But could such a tragedy ever happen here?

The SS Richard Montgomery ran aground and sank just off Sheerness back in 1944.

And as Channel 4's News chief correspondent Alex Thomson has been finding out – the ship’s wreck still contains thousands of tons of explosive ordinance.

For more see the footage on the story here. 

Published in Ports & Shipping

Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC) is one of Europe's biggest yacht racing clubs. It has almost sixteen hundred elected members. It presents more than 100 perpetual trophies each season some dating back to 1884. It provides weekly racing for upwards of 360 yachts, ranging from ocean-going forty footers to small dinghies for juniors.

Undaunted by austerity and encircling gloom, Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC), supported by an institutional memory of one hundred and twenty-nine years of racing and having survived two world wars, a civil war and not to mention the nineteen-thirties depression, it continues to present its racing programme year after year as a cherished Dublin sporting institution.

The DBSC formula that, over the years, has worked very well for Dun Laoghaire sailors. As ever DBSC start racing at the end of April and finish at the end of September. The current commodore is Eddie Totterdell of the National Yacht Club.

The character of racing remains broadly the same in recent times, with starts and finishes at Club's two committee boats, one of them DBSC's new flagship, the Freebird. The latter will also service dinghy racing on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Having more in the way of creature comfort than the John T. Biggs, it has enabled the dinghy sub-committee to attract a regular team to manage its races, very much as happened in the case of MacLir and more recently with the Spirit of the Irish. The expectation is that this will raise the quality of dinghy race management, which, operating as it did on a class quota system, had tended to suffer from a lack of continuity.