Although I enjoy almost every type of exploration, be that tunnels, buildings or cranes, my favourite would have to be ships. By their nature, ships as a destination tend to be hard to come by, warships even more so. This is down to a variety of reasons. Firstly, ships tend to end active service in one of three ways. They sink, get opened to the public or are scrapped. If its one of the first two, you can usually access them legitimately, either by taking a tour, or following a diving team if they sank in shallower waters. While you can still technically explore a ship that’s open to the public, that tends to class more as infiltration.

Vienna, the end of our stumble across Europe. Until now we had avoided spending money on accommodation, good friends more then willing to offer up a spare bed or couch along the way. However we were now in Vienna, we had none here. We were on our own, time to dig out the wallet. Our plan was to spend just one night in a hostel halfway through our stay for a wash and bum it the rest. So given the ”events” of the previous night it seemed like that time had finally come, but it was only 10am and there was something we needed to check first.

Belgium, the land that knows not of security, monarch fences or monitored cameras. The last time i visited this fine cheese eating country we were blown away by the sheer size, quality and ease of nearly all the locations we visited. Belgium and Brussels are perfect examples of what happens when your government isn’t trying to shove a bible sized wad of paper entitled ”Health and Safety” up your ring piece. We hatched a rough plan with some crayons, coloured in our road map and packed our bags. De muscles in Brussels was a go!

Normally if someone invited or suggested that we visit a fort I would usually say hell no. Being so old many of the forts ive seen tend to be very empty, ransacked and vandalized with little or no notable features. If your a nut for historical stuff then forts are probably more your cup of tea then mine, so knock yourself out.

The Hartlepool Able shipyard also known as the Hartlepool “Ghost Ships”. Was the last stop on the “Ahoy thar” road trip at the beginning of 07. Getting on the ships was as frustrating as it was rewarding. We spent almost three hours trying to get on the hulking giants, even resorting to taking a motorboat around the dock to see if there was anyway up on the sea side.

So it was the end of the “Something Crunchy” tour. We had bidden farewell to Site who had tagged in the international superstar known as Siologen Jeeves Westminster. With our team assembled we headed down to the Medway and began our mission to cross the murky depths, vessel sighted!