Martin Woodward on Diving

Historically, the Isle of Wight waters are very important because just here, if we could have a time clock now and turn back 200 years, this would be full of sailing ships anchored here, waiting for the right wind ‘cos it’s not like the ships here can just pull their anchor up, fire the engine up, go where they like.

But if the wind was westerly in the old days, then all these ships would be here waiting for that wind to die down so they could work their way down Channel because they can’t sail into the wind. They can only sail across it and ships like the ‘Victory’ like the square-rigger ones, they would be lucky if they could sail at right angles so if they tried to sail off down to the west and the wind was from the west, they wouldn’t get anywhere.

They would just be going up and down tacking that way and tacking that way but not actually making any progress into the wind.

You know, the Clipper ships were a little bit better and the fore and aft rigged ships could point a little bit closer to the wind and they made some progress, but this would be full of ships.

Even inside here, straight off here there’s the ‘Invincible’ wreck, the 1758 wreck, a very important wooden ship of that time, just of here there’s HMS Velox, 1915 that got mined off here in 1915, the ‘Empress Queen’ on the Ledge here, 1916, you could just rattle off loads and loads of names of wrecks, but this was the main anchorage for the big square riggers in the old days because that’s where they would either go into Portsmouth if they were Naval ships, or just wait for the wind to be in the right direction to be able to get off somewhere else.