The Beer Coastguard Rescue Team,

have a bit of a job on their hands,

as a huge container was spotted off of the shore at Axmouth, near Seaton at 08.11AM and is believed to be carrying 14 tons of Lark cigarettes, police have warned that it is not a free for all and the public should not remove any of the cigarettes, the Police and the Maritime and Coastguard Agency was informed that containers were lost from a Maersk cargo ship on Valentine’s Day as it crossed the northern stretch of the Bay of Biscay in stormy conditions, more than 500 boxes fell into the water – most of them were empty and are thought to have sunk - as high winds hit the ship during an attempted passage from Rotterdam to Sri Lanka, thankfully none of the crew were hurt but the loss of the containers is thought to have been one of the biggest ever losses suffered by Maersk,


years ago I remember watching a film of a similar indecent, Whisky Galore, where a ship floundered off of the Scottish coast and the locals tried to liberate the thousands of bottles of whiskey on it, the strange thing was that the film was based on a couple of true events the first, the Loch Sheil, the 'Whiskey Wreck' – 1877, Thorn Island, Pembrokeshire, the 1218 ton rigged sailing ship was carrying gunpowder and a cargo of 7000 cases of beer and whiskey, most was picked up by locals and hidden in cliffs or buried for years, two bottles of whiskey turned up in the roof of a house in 1950, the crew survived and the only casualty was a local who found some of the whiskey and drank himself to death, 

this wreck was then followed by another shipwreck, the 8,000-ton cargo ship the SS Politician which sank off the shores of Eriskay in the Outer Hebrides in 1941 and inspired the book and film Whisky Galore, back to Beer in Seaton which I visited with Steve from the UK when he was running a marathon there, I wonder how many cigarettes will be handed in?