roadstead
Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition
- noun A sheltered offshore anchorage area for ships.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- noun A partly-sheltered anchorage outside a harbour.
Examples
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We were all that afternoon and night, and part of the following day, descending the main channel of the Volga, and it was past noon before we reached the Nine Feet Station, for so they call the roadstead above which vessels of more than nine feet draught dare not venture.
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Sixteen years ago the hire of a boat from the harbour to the roadstead was a piastre and a half: now it is at least five.
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Only vessels of light draft can enter; large vessels anchor in the roadstead, which is the channel between Yloilo harbour and Guimarás Island.
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Meanwhile Linois had taken refuge in the tiny curve of the Spanish coast known as the roadstead of Algeciras.
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The anchorage was excellent, so far as the bottom was concerned, but it could scarcely be called a roadstead in any other point of view, since there was shelter against no wind but that which blew directly off shore, which happened to be a wind that did not prevail in that part of the island.
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Jim looked every day over the thickets of gardens, beyond the roofs of the town, over the fronds of palms growing on the shore, at that roadstead which is a thoroughfare to the East, — at the roadstead dotted by garlanded islets, lighted by festal sunshine, its ships like toys, its brilliant activity resembling a holiday pageant, with the eternal serenity of the Eastern sky overhead and the smiling peace of the Eastern seas possessing the space as far as the horizon.
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Some were for sailing right into the roadstead, the breeze blowing fresh toward the shore (as it usually does throughout those islands in the afternoon).
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Up the Goulet lay the reefs of the Little Girls, with their outlier, Pollux Reef, and beyond the Little Girls, in the outer roadstead, lay the French navy at anchor, forced to tolerate this constant invigilation because of the superior might of the Channel Fleet waiting outside, just over the horizon.
Note
The word 'roadstead' is a compound of 'road' and 'stead' (in the sense of a place).
