maritime

  Robin Hoods Bay My first recollection of school was around 1945 when I would be 5 years old. We lived in my grandfather’s large house in Robin Hoods Bay, a small fishing/farming community on the NE coast of Yorkshire. Robin Hoods Bay was really divided in two, those that lived at the bottom of the bank in the old village and those that lived at the top of the bank. Grandfather was a successful Captain, like many men in “the Bay” who bought new and expensive houses at the top of the bank. Our house, “Lincoln” had a large garden adjacent to the car park, a pantry, a “poshtub” in an outhouse where clothes were heated in a water bowl before being poshed, rinsed, and hug out to dry and a set of room indicators over the entrance hall inked to each room. The idea was that this was an indicator for servants where there was a request for service. Not sure why we had them as we had no servants!! School was in the hamlet of Thorpe some one kilometre away up two steep hills, Donkey b...

Free navigation on our oceans? Around seventy percent of the planet is covered by water, and we could be led to believe that everyone can travel and navigate wherever they want. It is a little more complicated than that. There are nations that have jurisdictions in the seas adjacent to their land and there are international maritime traffic regulations. Together these limit the notion of free navigation in many parts of the world. Freedom of navigation on the high seas historically has been governed by customs and bilateral agreements between nations. It was only with the creation of UNCLOS (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea) in 1982 that freedom of navigation became a right for all states. [1] So in principle, ships could travel wherever they wanted. However there are many places in the world where passage by sea is hindered by natural or artificial obstacles. Narrow straits or channels or canals or waterways passing through the territory of neighbouring countries. These...