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Boat that became grave for five men is found
WITH a hold packed with fish and a crew eager to get home after a fortnight at sea, the trawler fought on in a mounting force 10 gale.
Hit by two massive waves, she heeled over, capsizing and leaving the fishermen in a desperate battle for survival.
Fourteen made it, but five others didn't in a tragedy still all too common in the 1960s and they and the vessel plunged to a watery grave off Flamborough Head.
After more than four decades the story of the Arctic Viking may have eventually faded from memory.
But last Sunday divers from her own Yorkshire home port rediscovered the Boyd Line vessel at the bottom of the North Sea.
The ship – similar to the Arctic Corsair, which lies as a floating museum in the River Hull – made her final trip on September 27 1961, under the command of Skipper Philip Garner.
Her assumed resting place only recently came to the notice of a team from Hull, who took up the challenge of going offshore 20 miles and diving 230ft to the seabed to become the first people to see her again in nearly 50 years.
The first diver on the wreck – Hull British Sub Aqua Club projects officer Andy Dowsland – said it was an eerie sight: "It was very moving swimming up to the wreck and I was continually aware that people from Hull had died here."
The divers were blessed with good visibility and were able to take in the coral-encrusted rudder, hard to starboard, the huge winch in the front of the bridge and the ship's funnel lying crumpled on the seabed.
"It still had white paint on the stern," said Mr Dowsland, who recovered the telegraph which he'd like to see go on display.
He added: "There's no real clues to her sinking – but I've now partly cleaned the telegraph which shows the engine was full steam ahead when the vessel went down indicating that she and some of the crew went down fighting."
The sinking made a vivid impression on John Vincent, then just 17, and aboard
the Grimsby trawler Ross Cormorant, which was "laid and dodging" the same storm off the Head.
Now a guide at
Grimsby Fishing Heritage Centre, Mr Vincent recalled being told the ship had gone down by the next watch: "When you're running before a gale it's like being on a giant surfboard, the best white-knuckle ride there is. But she was unlucky.
"We were led to believe that they hadn't had the forward hatch boards on, they'd only had tarps and when the sea hit her, it went straight through the forehold and shoved the nose of the trawler down."
The skipper later told a Board of Trade inquiry that the second mountainous wave bought a "tremendous amount of water...and it was falling and falling more and more and all the time it was doing this she was curling over."
Some of the crew got into the lifeboat but others – three were down in their cabins – "hadn't a chance." He and the mate jumped into the maelstrom without lifejackets.
Their ordeal wasn't over yet, tossed about in an open lifeboat. But after an hour their distress rockets were seen by a Polish lugger which scooped them out of the water – although it was to be almost two days before they were back home in Hull, such was the severity of the storm.
The dive team – Mr Dowsland and Brian Smith, from Hull, and well-known Scarborough wreck hunter and researcher Carl Racey, a partner in the wreck site www.wrecksite.eu, have uploaded all the details onto the website, where they should be a resource for generations to come.
Research has revealed the vessel's colourful history. Requistioned in the Second World War and converted to an anti-submarine vessel, she was sunk by an enemy aircraft outside Portsmouth Harbour in May 1942 with the loss of 17 lives, before being refloated.
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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