Episode 4
Documentary following life on the English Channel. The Royal Navy bomb squad unearth a deadly relic that has been sitting on a mantelpiece for 30 years.
The Royal Navy bomb squad unearth a deadly relic that has been sitting on a mantelpiece for 30 years, a cargo ship resupplies the tiny island of Alderney and a young entrepreneur carefully navigates his life savings through the commercial shipping lanes.
After the Second World War, the Channel bed was left littered with bombs and mines, thousands of which are still to be recovered. It is the job of the Royal Navy's Southern Diving Unit to retrieve and safely dispose of them when they come to light. They answer up to 200 callouts a year. Normally it is fishing, dredging or bad weather that exposes them. But this time they are called to the middle of a housing estate in Worthing, where a house clearance has uncovered an unexploded German incendiary shell that has been sitting on the owner's mantelpiece for the last 30 years.
The tiny island of Alderney is closer to France than the UK. And its 2,000 residents are totally reliant on the cargo ship teams who bring them their weekly delivery of goods - everything from fresh fruit and vegetables to luxury goods and work materials. But as the crane at their port has a maximum lift of 19 tonnes, it is touch and go whether one item on today's delivery will make it off the ship.
Experienced young sailor Harry Reynolds has invested most of his inheritance on a 25-foot-tall ship that's nearly 100 years old. The ship is to be his new home but also at the heart of a new sailing school he's planning to set up in Dorset. But first he must navigate his precious asset from its old berth in Amsterdam through the busy shipping lanes of the Channel. With bad weather on the way, it's a risky adventure.