Richard And Jo Demeester's photos with the keyword: abandoned ships

Many of these were boats, but some of them, truly are small ships. There was something so powerful seeing these decaying hulks, so at odds with their purpose and function.

This was the only wooden boat that we saw. The timber was deteriorating fast. Not much was left of the deck, other than rows of rusting bolts with no planks left underneath. But a sizeable boat it still was.

Scores of kilometres, 80 or more, from the current shoreline of the Aral Sea. Moynaq was a fishing village in the 1950s and 60s, canning tonnes of fish every day. Over the decades, the Soviet agricultural developments started overusing the water from the feeder rivers. Primarily cotton, but it seemed too easy to keep diverting more and more water to irrigate dry and arid lands, not realising the long term consequences. Now, somewhere between 80% and 90% of the original water sources have disappeared. The sea is now less than 20% of its early 20th century size. Increased salinity means fish struggle to live in what remains. And these skip skeletons decay in the sun and sand as a stark monument to the sea which is gone, and will likely never return.