OAKGARTH (8407711), British, 452gt, completed McTay Marine, Bromborough 12-1984
Grimsby - 28 April 2013: She has arrived at this lay-by berth in the fortnight since my last visit and as with previous incumbents at this berth is presumably now for disposal.
This gives me the "excuse" to go out of our area and show her in action on the Mersey on 27 January 2012.
Sunshine and rain only minutes apart in these successive views! Taken from New Brighton. There, In a fairly short space of time we witnessed quite a number of the different elements of nature. For a start, it was cold, it was windy – they were the invisible elements, but we could see how choppy the sea was on the incoming tide and how some of the smaller ships and tugs were rocking and rolling even in the relative shelter of the river mouth. We saw a succession of changes in the weather, all lasting only minutes rather than hours – it rained (witness the OAKGARTH photo above where the raindrops can be seen slashing across the image, even in the mere 1/200th of a second or so that the shutter was open); it hailed (if only for a couple of minutes); it was cloudy, it was foggy, it was sunny, we enjoyed a rainbow, and several of the sequences I shot showed ships encountering all of these things over a period of 15 to 20 minutes that they were in view. And, eventually, when we decided we (or I!) had seen enough, it came over really dark and the heavens opened! What was it I said – two and a half to three hours to get home? Six and a bit hours later we did get home, after being stuck on the top of the M62 for three hours as a consequence of part of the motorway being shut for a while because so many cars had broken down in the snow that had by then fallen across the Pennines! That was surely our penance for me indulging myself that day!!!
Ah, all the joys of ship observing!!! (We'd gone there to drop off our son and his girlfriend in Liverpool the day before!)
Ron