As you walk along the Eastbourne seafront and look out to sea, you might notice an odd looking shape on the horizon, a shape looking something like a large cross.

In fact, that cross is a very important safety feature for any of the marine users navigating this part of the English Channel for its the Sovereign Light Tower.

Around about that point on the sea bed there’s a sand bank and at low tide it can be as shallow as about 2.5-3 meters.  That’s been a hazard to shipping over the years and has seen many ships run aground.

In olden days, to prevent this happening, there was an actual ship called the Royal Sovereign that had a lighthouse on it and was anchored on the bank to prevent ships running aground.

In modern times, the boat has been replaced by a more formal structure, which consists of a tower sticking into the sea bed with a helicopter platform and a lighthouse on top of it.

If you get a chance take one of the boat tours out there, it’s certainly well worth a look.

I wrote in a previous post about members of my local dive club participating in an introductory course in marine archaeolgy on 28th April.

That article covered the first 2 parts of the course, whereas this article covers the final part of the course where we all got wet in a local swimming pool to try and translate the stuff we’d learnt in the classroom and on the outdoor, ‘dry’ exercise into practise.

The photo shows an underwater frame, which is one technique of surveying all or part of a dive site. The other technique we used…
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In previous posts I’ve written about the wreck that has been recently discovered in Norman’s Bay and the plans of the licensee of the wreck to work with my local scuba diving club to research it further.

As part of these plans, five dive club members attended an Introductory course delivered by the Nautical Archaeological Society (NAS) on 28th April, at the NAS headquarters in Portsmouth.

The course was split into three parts:
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Whilst this was the catchphrase from a woman’s deoderant advert from the early 1980s, it has a much greater local relevance, and relates to an ongoing maritime saga that’s happening just off our immediate coastline in Pevensey Bay.

The ‘She’ in question is the HMS Resolution (known to have foundered in Pevensey Bay during the Great Storm of 1703), or could it be a Dutch Warship (lost during the Battle of Beachy Head in 1690)…

The mystery deepens…
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