The Middle Ground

Midway across the Narrow Sea lies a bank that has sunk more hulls than any other danger in those waters, and the pilots call it simply the Middle Ground. At low water it carries perhaps three fathoms, and over its northern tail less than two. At the bottom of the lowest spring tides it breaks the surface in two places, showing a pale shoulder of sand to anyone near enough to see it, which is generally too near.

It is a deceiving thing. From a deck the bank looks far smaller than it truly is, and it does not keep still, so that a sounding taken one year may be wrong the next. Worse, the old courses that cut over it are the quicker ones, and those that skirt it the slower, and a hurried master carrying an out-of-date chart will save himself half an hour right up to the moment his keel finds the sand. The Dover men say the Middle Ground was made for exactly that man, and they are not altogether joking.

Marking it has been the work and the quarrel of two centuries. Buoys have been laid and taken up again five times, because the marks cost dear, the water belongs to no one in particular, and neither shore of the strait has ever agreed which of them should bear the charge. Each side says freely that the bank needs proper marking, and each waits for the other to pay. Masters complain that what marks there are cannot be trusted to be in place, and most of them prefer to trust their own memory and the lead.

Every Narrow Sea master learns its name early, alongside the Sill and the fog, and the older pilots in Dover speak of it with a kind of weary respect, as of a neighbour who will never change.