Dartmouth Harbour Authority deal with sunken motor boat

Dart Harbour and Navigation Authority were called out to a six metre sunken motor boat just off the mouth of the river.

A passing RIB and Dart RNLI Lifeboat had rescued the crew, who had been forced to abandon her. They were very concerned about the risk to navigation and pollution from the wreck, which at that point only had the tip of its bow afloat, so deployed their Hercules.

Dartmouth Harbourmaster Paul Britton said: “By the time we got out there, there was only about probably half a metre of the bow of the boat sticking out of the water.

“It was in relatively shallow water, in about six metres of water, so its stern would touch the bottom and the bow just had a little bit of an air pocket in it.

“The owner had already been rescued and ended up swimming and a passing boat picked him up and transferred him to the RNLI lifeboat.

“We took him in and sent him out to hospital.”

It was an extremely challenging operation to lift the boat, with so little of it visible, not helped by having a rotten deck, so every cleat they secured to ripped out, however they were able to strap her on to the bow of Hercules, ease into Millbay to reposition and get her safely vertical back to the harbour.

Paul said they wanted to recover the boat: “We were obviously keen to do it because of the environmental and navigation impact.

“There was just a very small amount of the boat sticking up above the water.

“We got a few lines attached to a couple of cleats on the bow but they very quickly ripped out the deck of the boat was a bit rotten but we were able to just about keep it under control and get some strops wrapped and were able to take it initially into Mill Bay Cove.”

Eventually they were able to crane her ashore in Hoodown.