Coastal Stories

An extra dose of Coastal Stories; three coastal snippets, each with its own happy ending: a blind poet, a trans-hemispherical farce and a drunk with musical ambitions. 

By the mid-1930s Oliver Storm was the last remnant of a seafaring way of life at Robin Hood's Bay. 

When penniless Alice Smith met Eileen Sullivan in a Liverpool boarding house it opened up a world across the sea. But how to get there?

The paths of two lonely people from different sides of the Atlantic cross briefly to produce a simple act of kindness that will never be forgotten. 

From Victorian times up to the 1950s, Great Yarmouth would be swamped every autumn by thousands of the remarkable Scottish 'herring lassies', tough, hardworking women far from home.

From the Trenwiths of Scilly - a father-son human foghorn duo - to a pan-European foghorn concerto, via the Boddam Coo, we say hats off to the foghorn.

A mysterious Dublin door leads nowhere but to the strange story of a ship given up for lost.

Last seen three years earlier being herded in chains onto a convict ship to Australia facing a 14 year sentence, the last place Charlie Dolphus was supposed to be in November 1839 was a Manchester boarding house. When put before the beak he told quite a story.  

At the end of a long, hot summer class war came to a shingle beach in East Sussex. Its weapon of choice: the mackintosh. 

A lonely American seaman drops a message in a bottle into the Atlantic. Hundreds of miles away an Irish teen is driving her cows to pasture near the shore when she spots something among the seaweed...

In the summer of 1808 a clergyman spotted something strange in the sea as he shuttled between his Hebridean island parishes. A few weeks later something very odd washed up on an Orkney beach. 

You'd think being hanged for robbery and murder would be the end of it. Not for Ambrose Gwinnett, it wasn't.

It's New Year's Eve 1931 and the crew of the Flamborough lifeboat is called out just before midnight. 

Upside down ships and Folkestone door numbers: a brief selection of some notable mirages. 

In 1938 keeper Jack Cross sailed out to the Wyre lighthouse off the coast of Fleetwood in Lancashire for his 11th successive lighthouse Christmas.

In 1954 44-year-old boilermaker Ted May set out to swim the Channel without a pilot boat - or any practical support at all. It was supposed to change his life. It was incredibly dangerous.

Here comes the Coastal Stories podcast, your official muster station for the best in maritime tales.