The Abyssal Zone 3

The Abyssal Zone 3: Aaron Yeandle

The Abyssal Zone Guernsey is an island that is part of the Channel Islands in the English Channel and is extremely near the French coast. Guernsey has been a port of call for shipping for over 2,000 years. Sitting close to the main sea routes into the English Channel. Today Guernsey still relies on shipping for most of its resources including food and imported goods. The island has a long distinctive history regarding sea legends, shipwrecks, ghost ships and sunken vessels. Guernsey and the Channel Islands have some of the most dangerous coastal surroundings in the world. There have been almost a thousand shipwrecks in the Channel Islands over the centuries. With strong hazardous tides, dangerous reefs, large rocky outcrops and extremes of weather, from ferocious winds to blanket fog. Historically Guernsey, relied exclusively on the sea for its links with the outside world, and the volume of maritime traffic over the years, combined with the difficulty of navigating the rock-strewn waters around the Channel Islands, inevitably resulted in a large number of shipwrecks, including countless disastrous events in which many lives were lost. The are numerous rocks permanently above water, some of which are eighty feet high, there are extensive shoals and submerged ledges, some with only three feet of water over them at high tide. Within the reef there is a constant clashing of tides with fierce overfalls that can run at ten knots over the uneven bottom. At low water, the tide rips through the gullies between the rocks. Nearly three hundred ships are recorded as having come to grief on the Casquets. It was on this group of rocks that there occurred one of the most disastrous shipwrecks ever known in the English Channel. These rocks serve as solemn monuments to a bygone era of shipping and shipwrecks. These imposing and treacherous outcrops now stand as nature’s own found gravestones, marking the memory of a long-lost age.

£100

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