Sheerness Tide Today

Sheerness Shipping

Isle of Sheppey Sailing Club

Isle of Sheppey Sailing Club Live Webcam (East of Sheerness)
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Isle of Sheppey Sailing Club webcam

Sheerness as see from the Nore, JMW Turner
Sheerness as seen from the Nore, J M W Turner

1823: Sheerness -

Sheerness 1823
Sheerness.
Drawn & Engraved by Willm. Daniell. Published by W. Daniell, Cleveland Street, Fitzroy Square, London. Augst. 1 1823

1828: Sheerness -

Sheerness 1828
Sheerness in Westall And Owen's Picturesque Tour Of The Thames (1828)
S. Owen delt. R.G. Reeve sculpt. Published 1828 by R.Ackermann, 96 Strand, London.

31 Frith photos of Sheerness
 
2000: Sheerness. Importing cars -

Sheerness Aerial photo, 2000
Sheerness in 2000, Adrian Warren Photo Library

597: On Christmas Day in the Swale at the mouth of the Medway, 10,000 Saxons were baptised by Saint Augustine, following the example of their King Eadelberht I
 
1667: Dutch Invasion, Rudyard Kipling Listen to 'Dutch Invasion' -

If wars were won by feasting,
Or victory by song,
Or safety found, by sleeping sound
How England would be strong!
But honour and dominion
Are not maintain-ed so,
They're only got by sword and shot
And this the Dutchmen know!
 
The moneys that should feed us
you spend on your delight,
How can you then, have sailor-men
To aid you in your fight?
Our fish and cheese are rotten,
Which makes the scurvy grow
We cannot serve you if we starve,
And this the Dutchmen know!
 
Our ships in every harbour
Be neither whole nor sound,
And when we seek to mend a leak,
No Oakum can be found,
Or, if it is, the caulkers,
and carpenters also,
For lack of pay have gone away,
And this the Dutch men know!
 
Mere powder, guns and bullets,
we scarce can get at all;
Their price was spent in merriment
and revel at Whitehall,
While we in tattered doublets
From ship to ship must row,
Beseeching friends for odds and ends
And this the Dutchmen know!
 
No King will heed our warnings,
No Court will pay our claims
Our King and Court for their disport
Do sell the very Thames!
For, now De Ruyter's topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet
And this the Dutchmen know!

Better still spend that money on education and fair trade and justice and we will no longer need barbaric armaments!

Wreck of the Richard Montgomery

1944: Anchor dragged and she grounded on a sandbank where she broke her back.
Montgomery Wreck Chart: Click for full screen, zoomable, scrollable version


Montgomery Wreck Chart: Click for full screen, zoomable, scrollable version

1.5 miles from Sheerness, 5 miles from Southend and only 700 feet from the Medway Channel.
Yes, that white area next to the Buoy marked "South Mont" is the shipping channel!

Richard Montgomery Wreck
Wreck of the Richard Montgomery

Richard Montgomery Wreck
Wreck of the Richard Montgomery - buoys being cleaned July 2020

BBC News on the Richard Montgomery -

 

The Mirror of the Sea: Joseph Conrad -

But soon the course of the ship opens the entrance of the Medway, with its men-of-war moored in line, and the long wooden jetty of Port Victoria, with its few low buildings like the beginning of a hasty settlement upon a wild and unexplored shore.

The famous Thames barges sit in brown clusters upon the water with an effect of birds floating upon a pond.

On the imposing expanse of the great estuary the traffic of the port where so much of the world's work and the world's thinking is being done becomes insignificant, scattered, streaming away in thin lines of ships stringing themselves out into the eastern quarter through the various navigable channels of which the Nore lightship marks the divergence.

The coasting traffic inclines to the north; the deep-water ships steer east with a southern inclination, on through the Downs, to the most remote ends of the world.

In the widening of the shores sinking low in the gray, smoky distances the greatness of the sea receives the mercantile fleet of good ships that London sends out upon the turn of every tide.

They follow each other, going very close by the Essex shore.

Such as the beads of a rosary told by business-like shipowners for the greater profit of the world they slip one by one into the open:

while in the offing the inward-bound ships come up singly and in bunches from under the sea horizon closing the mouth of the river between Orfordness and North Foreland.
They all converge upon the Nore, the warm speck of red upon the tones of drab and gray, with the distant shores running together towards the west, low and flat, like the sides of an enormous canal.