Word: solent
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...wreck of the Mary Rose moldered for 437 years in the chilly waters of the Solent, as the nautical avenue between the Isle of Wight and Portsmouth is called. Time and tide did their work: after centuries of erosion, only the starboard half of the warship's timbers remained intact in their silt-laden grave. But those blackened beams were more than enough last week to provide yet another spectacle for royal eyes. Under the anxious gaze of Prince Charles and thousands of ordinary Britons, the remains of the Mary Rose emerged from the Solent in the embrace...
More than a century later, the image of the wreck haunted the imagination of Alexander McKee, a historian who skindived throughout the Solent in order to find the vessel. In 1966 he discovered a 19th century naval chart that marked the site of the sinking. Says McKee: "I was electrified." Using undersea scanning technology developed by Electrical Engineer Harold Edgerton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, McKee found the remains of the Mary Rose buried in a watery depression. For four years the historian and a band of amateur divers dug away, sometimes with their bare hands, until they discovered...
...above the concrete runway. Test Pilot Peter Lamb maneuvered it easily, using a standard aircraft control stick. To dramatize the low friction of its air cushion, Inventor Christopher Cockrell pushed the four-ton craft around the apron by hand. Later the Hovercraft was towed out into the Solent for its first water trial. It rose in a cloud of spray and skimmed easily above the water among yachts and harbor traffic...
...boatyard. In World War II. though, he became the Air Ministry's darling when he conjured up a parachuting, self-righting, self-bailing life raft for airmen downed at sea. He demonstrated its effectiveness one midwinter day by stripping before startled British brass and leaping into the icy Solent to board his raft...
...graving dock, only one in England big enough to accommodate giantesses like the Queen Mary, was out of commission with smashed floodgates. The Empress basin was blocked by a sunken tanker, its wharves torn by gaping holes. Leaving port the master of the Magalhaes counted 23 wrecks in the Solent. "South England is dying," he concluded, "no miracle can stem the tide...