There are five new photographs on the Photo page starting from number six. Only three or four photograpgs left.
Here are a few pics of interesting finds at Dungeness!
Two common cranes that paid us a very rare visit.
Rosy Underwing Moth – a rarity for Kent and a first for me and a credit on the mothsofdungeness website!
Great Green Bush Cricket – specimen found was 4 inches long and a very handsome chap!
The Black Hut on Rye Harbour – just to show you it does exist! Jill (Epping)
More Turkeys. Marie/NJ
Jill’s mention of Dungeness reminded me of a job I once had as a Driver for a Company delivering refrigerant gas to Ships in the London Docks. Boring would be an understatement. An adventure would be a twenty mile journey to Tilbury Docks. So when I was offered overtime on a Saturday morning to Dungeness, it was as if I was being offered an adventure. As it happened it turned out to be very different from my normal working day.
The delivery instructions for the gas was to the agent for a ship. On arriving at the office that overlooked the sea, the ship was pointed out to me as a speck on the horizon, with the instructions that I would have to deliver it out there, and that a boat would be available to take me there at the end of a long jetty that was only accessible by a Thomas the Tank look alike train. The gas bottle was as tall as me and weighed twice as much, that I would normally deliver at the side of the ship on the dock side in London. With no wheelbarrow I had to ask the train driver to drop the bottle at the end of the jetty for me. The only place for the gas bottle was on the footplate of the train and which the driver invited me to stand. Although it was the first and last time that I ever stood on an engine footplate, that was not my lasting memory of the journey, it was when the train went round a sharp bend that for a frightening moment I thought that I was going to finish up in the English Channel.
The train driver pointed out the boat that was to take me and the gas bottle to the ship. It looked well over laden with stores for the ship before the bottle and me got in, and I swear it wasn’t much bigger than the dingy on our lake. The journey to the ship took getting on for three quarters of an hour in not a raging sea but not over calm either. It didn’t help my courage with the sea splashing over the sides of the boat, leaving more seas water in the bottom than I liked the look of. If I had a baling implement I would have been using it. Unloading the stores and gas bottle was a nightmare that I would never want to experience again. The ships gangway was lowered fully down but it was still at head height one minute and nearly sinking our boat the next, somehow we had to pass the store to the ships crew who were chain passing them to each other on the gangway. I had signed up for the Merchant Navy and had done a couple of three months trips only a year or so before, never once being seasick, or was I on the outward journey to the ship to deliver the gas bottle, but was I ill on the way back to land.
I never had reason or a desire to return to Dungeness. Until Jill’s mentioned it I forgot it even existed. The photographs made me think of it in a different way.