Here's a site that does live tracking of ships: https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:1.7/centery:51.0/zoom:9 https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/

Here's a site that does live tracking of ships: https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:1.7/centery:51.0/zoom:9 https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:1.7/center... "Since December 2004, the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) requires all passenger and commercial vessels over 299 Gross Tonnage that travel internationally to carry an AIS transponder that include a GPS receiver which collects the vessel's position and movement details." Counting across the longest segment of ships at the narrowest point of the English Channel in the feature article I see about 18 ships. In the live image from marinetraffic I see about 8. So even though the feature article is a composite image, the English Channel is indeed pretty crowded.