Lionel Callow Photography

Monday, 28 August 2017

Dungeness Lifeboat Station

Having been to Dungeness before, an old favourite with photographers and artists I decided to pay another visit. I started with the lifeboat station with it’s Shannon class lifeboat. “The Shannon is the latest class of all-weather lifeboat to join the RNLI fleet. She’s the first modern all-weather lifeboat to be propelled by waterjets instead of traditional propellers, making her our most agile and manoeuvrable all-weather lifeboat yet.” (source RNLI website, can be seen here). Dungeness Lifeboat Station can be found here.

The station is approached from the almost barren beach, used predominately by the fishing industry. Famous with photographers for the abandoned machinery, boats & dilapidated sheds. More of that in my next post.

The boat is launched from the beach by this very powerful semi-submerged recovery tractor.

This was the first station to get a boat with the new revolutionary propulsion by waterjets instead of the traditional propellers. The next two shots below show these waterjets.

The shot below shows the boat's chief engineer who was engaged in some routine maintenance but took some timeout to have a chat.

Down House

Visit to Down House, home of Charles Darwin. We have visited this famous home on several occasions, it is a fascinating place with the mixture of the scientific exhibits, telling the story of this great man's work along with the interesting way the family had lived. On this occasion, I spent most of my time in his gardens, his laboratory.

This chap, Philip was sitting under the protection of this very large tree playing his guitar very softly obviously for his own pleasure. A very gentle and pleasant person.