maritime

  Trials and tribulations at the airport Lately we have been using group travel to travel abroad instead of all the planning necessary when you do it yourself. It is convenient and you meet interesting people also in the group. The downside is that the itinerary is decided, and timing is sometimes not convenient. Take our last trip to Puglia in southern Italy in October. The travel instructions stated that we meet up at the airport at 0515, that is very early for us and necessitated an overnight stay in an airport hotel. Early morning in the airport was chaos, it seems that all charter companies have early morning departures. We rush to find a free check-in automat, no friendly face just a machine that seems to demand an ever-increasing number of personal details before spewing out baggage tags and boarding passes. Pushed out of the queue by impatient persons behind us we found a free space to attach our baggage tags and store our baggage id tags, not in your passport at it...

  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...