Filming Activity on the Mersey

Now that I’ve found an interesting local route for some cycling I’ve been getting out for a ride every couple of days. One of the nice side-effects of this is that I’m getting to see more of the activity on the river, given that I cycle along the bank from the old Garden Festival site all the way to the Albert Dock.

As I’ve got my phone with me (tracking my progress via the GPS and MapMe.At) it means I can use @merseyshipping’s twitter feed to find out the names of the ships I see; it’s been good to start putting some “faces” to the names I’ve been seeing coming and going on the river over the past year.

To complete the “living in the future” scenario, I’ve been streaming live video of some of the more interesting happenings that I encounter on the river. The app from Qik makes it trivial to share video on the web, although it would be nice if you could download your videos too. You can see all the videos I take by visiting my page on Qik but I thought I’d share some of the recent river ones here…

First off is one I took when out with John. We had to wait until these yachts had left the lock before we could carry on our ride, as we needed to cross the bascule bridge over the lock…

A few days later I caught the dredger Norma clearing the entrance to the Canning Half-tide Basin next to the Albert Dock…

And on Saturday I happened to arrive at the Albert Dock just as the cruise liner Crystal Symphony was departing. By the time I’d made it round to the cruise liner terminal I’d missed the tug pulling her round, but did get to see them both leave and the Isle of Man catamaran Manannan coming in and the Liverpool pilot boat Pv Dunlin heading out.