Sealand, seven miles off the beach at Felixstowe

davidej said:
You guys must be young - the happy days of pirate radio and roy bates- the biggest pirate of them all
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I remember the pirate radio station near there in the 1980's with Charlie Wolf, ' The Sea Wolf '; " we've had a complaint from Boy George that we said his latest record didn't sound like a Number 1 hit; well all his records sound like Number 2's to us ! "
 
The Maunsell forts - on Red Sands and Shivering sands. Our club has a race out to the Red Sands. I believe that an episode of Dr Who was staged on the Red Sands forts.
 
fergie_mac66 said:
seem to recollect at onetime they had there own money minted
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Yip - you can buy it and stamps from their website!

They appear to make their money by hosting internet services for companies who are unable to host in their country of origin for "legal reasons". I dread to imagine what that actually means is on their servers... ...however I assume the data must actually route via the UK as I'd think Satellite latency is too slow for commercial servers. So I assume if it was something really dubious someome would just "cut" the cable...

If you read their website they appear to have had a 1NM exclusion zone in place since 2006 although I saw a much more recent YouTube video where a yacht clearly sailed a couple of hundered feet off without being shot at.
 
Minn said:
It isn't really very interesting, and compared to all the windmills it is pretty insignificant. The Gunfleet pile lighthouse is prettier.
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I don't think anyone is giving it points for prettiness, but the story is surely more than mildly interesting, and, as I said above, quintessentially English. Picture from 2005 - before the fire - attached.
 
Anybody know how deep the water is just there? And how many tonnes of concrete those towers must contain?

I don't know the east coast at all - though my dad's dad was from Pin Mill. What must life be like on that structure in an Easterly gale?
 
dancrane said:
Anybody know how deep the water is just there? And how many tonnes of concrete those towers must contain?
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If you go to http://navionics.com/en/webapp , you can peruse "charts" for more or less anywhere in the world.

Looks like about 8 or 9 metres around Rough's Tower.

Sure there's a lot of concrete involved, but do note that the legs are hollow rather than solid. Various layers of accommodation, stores, generators, fuel tanks etc inside them.

Pete
 
dancrane said:
Anybody know how deep the water is just there? And how many tonnes of concrete those towers must contain?

I don't know the east coast at all - though my dad's dad was from Pin Mill. What must life be like on that structure in an Easterly gale?
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they are hollow & were floated there in a similar way to the Mulberry Hbr was, the depth around 7m LAT
 
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That's pretty deep! I wonder how thick the concrete is in the round walls. I'd imagined these forts would have been built with fairly short-term durability in mind, given the reason for their construction. Their endurance through seventy years of neglect and in such a continuously unforgiving location, is impressive. I suppose there's a spiral stairway that descends into the varying depths according to the height of tide.

Does anybody know when/why the Mulberry harbour inside Langstone Entrance was left there?
 
dancrane said:
That's pretty deep! I wonder how thick the concrete is in the round walls. I'd imagined these forts would have been built with fairly short-term durability in mind, given the reason for their construction. Their endurance through seventy years of neglect and in such a continuously unforgiving location, is impressive. I suppose there's a spiral stairway that descends into the varying depths according to the height of tide.

Does anybody know when/why the Mulberry harbour inside Langstone Entrance was left there?
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Im sure Mr search engine would reveal all
 
Familiar sight out here, this is the Red Sand Tower, about 5 miles N of Whitstable and a waypoint if you travel between East Swale and Swin. A few miles east of this lot is a similar edifice called Shivering Sands, and then NE of there is the Knock John, which is the same design as the Sealand thing.
Red Sands has a preservation society involved with it. Note the radio mast.
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The red sands forts are one of my favourite destinations. Photos don't do justice to the sheer size of them, as you sail round and look UP to them!

Here's something that not many people realise...

An episode of Danger Man was filmed on location on the red sands forts in the 60s, allowing you to see what they were actually like when in commission!

And the whole episode is on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OQ6vwaFL2s

A fascinating thing also, from a filmmaker's point of view, is what a weak storyline passed as acceptable in the 60s!
 
It is a micronation

At the risk of being tedious. All of the historic offshore military constructions are starkly appealing in some sense. Most of them are visually more appealing than Roughs, and I have photographs of many of them. The entertaining aspect of this is that Roy Bates, on the basis that it was outside the (then) territorial waters, occupied it and declared it a nation - and it turned out that there was buger all anyone, including the British government and the British Navy could do about it. And it persists to this day, even having survived an expansion of territorial waters, on the basis that it has as much right to territorial waters as the UK. The stories of international battle, holding prisoners of war and expressions of solidarity with other world leaders - like the message to the US President after 911 are breathtakingly ridiculous or cherished bastions of eccentricity - take your choice.
 
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