Last night we anchored at Dover, surrounded by ferry terminals, with a remarkable castle perched on the notorious white cliffs. We got underway early, and are once again crushing rocks in the engine room, proceeding directly into a headwind with the Goodwin Sands shoals just off our port beam. The forecast is for the wind to go East, which it has refused to do so far, but even if it stays NE we should be able to sail once we turn the corner and head into the Thames Estuary.
 

We’ll pass near the Nore anchorage at the mouth of the Thames, just as we passed Spithead anchorage off of Portsmouth. These anchorages were the scene of a major mutiny of Royal Navy ships during the Napoleonic Wars, when a large part of the British home fleet ran their officers off. After a tense stand-off the leaders of mutiny were hung, and the impressed seamen of the fleet returned to duty. Reading the romanticized fluff of Patrick Obrian and C.S. Forester it’s difficult to imagine how hard the life of lower deck seamen was in that era. I think it was Winston Churchill who wrote that the motivation of the Royal Navy of that era was “Rum, sodomy, and the lash.” Oh, for the good old days. At least the rum part.
 
With any luck by tonight we’ll be tied up alongside at a big container port called Tilbury, which will give us a chance to get sorted out tomorrow before going upriver on the 14th. If the wind does in fact go East, maybe the pilot will let us sail. I’m not holding my breath waiting for that, as there is an amazing amount of highly motorized fast ferry traffic around here that seems to view us as an interesting marker on their Collision Avoidance System/Gameboy console. The navigating officers who communicate with us by radio from the bridge all sound very Slavic. The pilots say they’re mainly Poles, some Russians. The other day one of them responded to a request for a little more room in passing by saying “Don’t worry. I’m not worrying.” Easy for him to say, in the comfort and security of his welded steel ship.
 
But life is good, and the sun is shining.
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