The English Channel has been the subject of intensive wreck research for decades. The result is that almost every German U-boat wreck in the Channel has now been identified. There are very few mysteries left. Which is what makes it rather remarkable when another one suddenly appears.

This is the story of how one did, and how a single transposed digit in a post war document had been hiding it in plain sight since 1944.

The wrong wreck

On 25 July 2026, Ian Taylor and the Skin Deeper dive team set out to investigate a wreck that the UK Hydrographic Office records had tentatively identified as the Hildegard, an American sailing vessel lost in 1917. When they reached the seabed, something was immediately obvious. This was not a sailing vessel. It was a submarine. Almost certainly German, almost certainly Second World War.

Unable to establish exactly which boat they had found, they passed the details to Dom Robinson and the Gasperados, a diving team led by Steve Mortimer, to see whether an identification could be made.

As soon as Dom looked at where the wreck was sitting, one particular U-boat came to mind: U-672.

A digit out of place

The reason lay in research conducted by Dr Innes McCartney, one of the foremost authorities on German U-boat losses around the British Isles. In his doctoral thesis, McCartney had compared the official post war records of U-boat losses against what divers were actually finding on the seabed. U-672 presented a persistent problem. According to the official record, it had been lost at 50°03′N, 2°30′W. But no submarine matching its description had ever been found anywhere near that position.

McCartney concluded that someone, at some point in the post war compilation of records, had transposed two digits in the longitude. The intended position was not 2°30′W — it was 3°20′W. That small clerical error had moved the wreck more than 30 nautical miles west on every chart and database that followed.

The corroboration was hard to argue with. After U-672 was scuttled, her crew were recovered from the water. The position recorded for those survivors in the Admiralty records was approximately 50°01′N, 3°20′W, almost exactly the corrected location. As Axel Niestlé, who has spent four decades examining wartime U-boat photographs and records, noted: it is almost impossible to account for 50 men in small rubber dinghies drifting 40 miles overnight. The attack position, not the rescue position, was the error.

The wreck Ian Taylor had found was 37 miles from the officially recorded loss position of U-672, and roughly five miles from the corrected one.

Into the water

The first dive attempt, on 15 August, came to nothing. The shot line missed the wreck, Dom scootered 60 metres across featureless sand following drag marks, found nothing, and called the dive.

The following day, Dom went back in with Guy Trees. The shot missed again, but this time the current was right. The two of them headed out across empty seabed on scooters. Then Dom spotted an anglerfish, which tend to congregate around wrecks. Then an octopus on a piece of rope. Then a lot of fish. And then, out of the gloom, the bow appeared: that distinctive knife-like profile that belongs only to a submarine.

They had about 20 minutes of working time at 70 metres. They made it count.

Reading the evidence

The hull was recognisably a Type VIIC. The most common German submarine of the Second World War, built in the hundreds. Type alone proved nothing.

What mattered were the details. U-672 had been fitted with a snorkel during a refit in the spring of 1944. The wreck carried an early ball-float schnorkel head, without the radar-detection mats added to later installations. This was consistent with that spring 1944 refit, and inconsistent with a boat lost any later in the war. There were no external rescue dinghy containers at the bow; those became standard fitting in late 1944, after U-672 was already on the seabed. The outer casing showed three rectangular openings followed by a smaller circular one; a pattern that matched wartime photographs of U-670, built in the same Hamburg yard and the same production batch as U-672. The propeller was steel rather than bronze, consistent with the material shortages that increasingly constrained German production from 1943 onwards.

Then there was the pile of pressurised steel cylinders Dom found just aft of the conning tower. He had no idea what they were. Niestlé recognised them immediately: hydrogen cylinders, part of the Aphrodite radar-decoy system. This was a German device that used hydrogen-filled balloons trailing aluminium strips to create false radar echoes while the submarine slipped away beneath them. More than 80 years on the seabed, and they were still there.

The closed hatches, which seemed puzzling for a deliberately scuttled boat, resolved themselves against the historical record. The engineering officer was the last man out. He opened the flooding vents, climbed through the conning tower, and sealed the hatch behind him.

The men aboard

U-672 had been laid down on Christmas Eve 1941 in Hamburg, launched in February 1943, and commissioned in April 1943. Her only commanding officer throughout was Oberleutnant zur See Ulf Lawaetz, born in Copenhagen in 1916 and half Danish by heritage. He had previously served as a watch officer aboard U-564 before taking command.

The boat completed three war patrols without sinking a single Allied vessel, survived a serious attack by a Canadian Sunderland flying boat from 423 Squadron (which very nearly destroyed the aircraft when one of its own depth charges detonated prematurely) and sailed on its fourth and final patrol on 6 July 1944, a month after D-Day, into a Channel saturated with Allied anti-submarine assets.

On 18 July 1944, HMS Balfour detected U-672 by Asdic and attacked with Hedgehog — a forward-firing weapon that projected 24 contact-fused projectiles. Three detonated. The boat took on water. The crew fought the flooding and failed to control it. Lawaetz ordered abandonment. All 52 men got out. All 52 survived and were taken prisoner. Lawaetz himself lived to 85, dying in Copenhagen in 2002.

From the British perspective, the attack had been inconclusive. No wreckage, no oil, no bodies had surfaced. Without those markers, the Admiralty would have had little basis for claiming a confirmed kill.

The verdict

Niestlé reviewed the images sent via satellite link from the dive boat and, within hours of Dom’s decompression being complete, offered his assessment: 90–95% confidence in the identification as U-672. Not on any single piece of evidence, but on the cumulative weight of type, schnorkel generation, absent dinghy containers, hull-opening pattern, steel propeller, corrected position, and survivor rescue location. Added to this that there was an absence of any other plausible candidate U-boat in the area.

For Dom Robinson, the appeal of this kind of diving has never been purely about finding things. As he put it himself: finding something on the seabed is exciting, but finding out what it is, working through the history, comparing what you can see underwater with records that might be more than a hundred years old, and eventually being able to put a name to a wreck, that is one of the best parts of diving.

U-672 is no longer one of the English Channel’s unsolved mysteries. It took a clerical error, four decades of archival research, two dive attempts, 20 minutes of working time at 70 metres, and a pile of hydrogen cylinders that nobody recognised until the right person looked at the photograph.

A touching postscript came when Ulf Lawaetz's family got in touch to say how pleased they were that his boat had been found. They sent Dom a copy of his death notice, a picture of him as an old man and also a tag from U-672 that he kept all his life (see pictures below).

A recreational scuba diver can go to 40 metres. That is the limit, the point at which standard training ends and the physics of breathing compressed air begin to make the exercise genuinely dangerous. Below that, the rules, the equipment and the planning changes. Because now the risks have changed considerably.

The Lusitania lies at 90 metres.

Dom Robinson dives wrecks like her routinely. What follows is an attempt to explain what that means — not the romance of it, but the mechanics. What it takes to get down there, what happens to a human body at that depth, and why so few divers ever attempt it.

Why 40 metres is the ceiling

Scuba diving on air works because the body can manage the effects of breathing compressed gas at moderate depth. Below 40 metres those effects compound quickly.

Nitrogen narcosis (sometimes called “rapture of the deep”) is the primary concern. At depth, nitrogen behaves in the bloodstream like a mild anaesthetic. The effect varies between individuals, but the general pattern is predictable: impaired judgement, slowed reaction times, a loosening of the mental grip that keeps a diver disciplined and focused. At 30 metres the effects are manageable. At 60 metres on air, they can be disabling. At 90 metres, breathing standard compressed air is simply not compatible with arriving back at the surface.

The second hazard is oxygen toxicity. As depth increases, the partial pressure of oxygen in the breathing gas rises. Beyond certain thresholds, oxygen becomes toxic to the central nervous system: causing convulsions, underwater, with no warning. This is not a marginal risk. It is a predictable physical consequence of the wrong gas at the wrong depth.

The third is decompression. Spend time at depth and nitrogen dissolves into the body’s tissues. Ascend too quickly and it comes back out as bubbles — in the joints, in the spine, in the brain. Decompression sickness ranges from painful to permanently disabling or fatal.

The old answer, and why the new one is better

For decades, the technical diving community solved these problems with open-circuit trimix: a breathing gas blending helium with oxygen and nitrogen, carried in multiple cylinders for different stages of the dive. Helium does not cause narcosis. The oxygen fraction is reduced to manage toxicity at depth. On the ascent, the diver switches through progressively richer oxygen mixes at designated stops to clear nitrogen from the tissues. It works. Divers still use it.

But open-circuit trimix has limitations that become increasingly inconvenient at extreme depth. A diver burns through gas fast. Every exhaled breath is vented into the water as bubbles and lost. At 90 metres, gas consumption is high enough that carrying sufficient volume for a meaningful dive, and for the long decompression stops on the way back up, requires a considerable collection of cylinders. Helium is expensive. And the bottom time, even after all of it, remains short.

The shift that has transformed deep technical diving over the past two decades is the closed-circuit rebreather: the CCR. Dom uses one. Most serious deep wreck divers now do.

How a rebreather works

The principle is straightforward, even if the engineering is not.

In open-circuit diving, every breath is exhaled into the water and wasted. A rebreather recycles it. When the diver exhales, the gas passes through a scrubber canister packed with a chemical absorbent, typically a material called sofnolime, which strips out the carbon dioxide the body has produced. The remaining gas, now CO2-free, is returned to the breathing loop and inhaled again. A small amount of fresh oxygen is added automatically to replace what the body has consumed, maintaining the correct oxygen level throughout.

The result is a closed system. Nothing is vented. The diver is breathing a loop of gas that is continuously cleaned and topped up. The bubbles that trail behind every open-circuit diver, the immediate visual signature of scuba, simply do not exist. CCR divers ascend in silence.

The practical consequences of this are significant. Gas consumption drops dramatically. Where an open-circuit diver at 90 metres might exhaust their supply in minutes, a CCR diver uses only what their body metabolises: primarily oxygen, in modest quantities. A compact oxygen cylinder that would last a recreational diver a single shallow dive can sustain a CCR diver for hours. The decompression obligation is also reduced, because the rebreather continuously optimises the oxygen partial pressure throughout the dive, minimising inert gas loading in the tissues.

More bottom time, less gas, and shorter decompression. Those are the gains.

What the dive looks like

A CCR dive to 90 metres on a wreck like the Lusitania still requires careful planning and a structured ascent. But the profile looks different from an open-circuit dive, and the experience at the bottom is different too.

Dom has described the quality of time on a wreck with a rebreather. The extended bottom time that was simply not available on open circuit changes the nature of the dive. You are not racing the gas. You are not counting minutes against a cylinder pressure that is dropping fast. You can move slowly. You can look properly. A wreck like the Lusitania, at that depth, is too large and too complex to absorb in a twenty-minute sprint. The rebreather makes a more considered visit possible.

The ascent still demands patience. Decompression stops remain non-negotiable (the body still needs time to off-gas nitrogen safely) but they are typically shorter on CCR than on open circuit, because the rebreather has been managing the oxygen partial pressure throughout the dive rather than delivering a fixed gas mixture regardless of depth. The diver still hangs in open water, watching the depth gauge and the dive computer, waiting. But less of it.

The equipment and the commitment

A CCR is a sophisticated piece of life-support equipment. It is also, by the standards of the diving industry, expensive; new units used for serious technical diving cost anything from £7,000 to £12,000. They require meticulous maintenance. The scrubber canister must be repacked before each dive. The oxygen sensors that monitor the breathing loop must be checked and replaced on schedule. A failure of the scrubber — allowing carbon dioxide to build up in the loop — is one of the most serious emergencies in diving, partly because the symptoms can be subtle until they are not.

For this reason, every CCR diver carries bailout: open-circuit cylinders strapped to the body, ready to be switched to if the rebreather fails. The bailout is not optional. It is a mandatory redundancy, and planning its volume is a critical part of dive preparation. If something goes wrong at 90 metres, the bailout must contain enough gas to complete the decompression and reach the surface safely.

Training for CCR technical diving at this level is sequential and takes years. Open-circuit technical diving comes first: learning gas management, decompression theory, and the discipline that deep diving demands. CCR training builds on that foundation. The certification pathway is long, and it cannot be rushed, because at 90 metres the margin for error is narrow and the consequences of mistakes are immediate.

Dom Robinson has been diving for more than three decades. The technical certifications he holds represent years of accumulated training and thousands of dives. When he descends to a wreck at this depth, he is not taking a casual risk. He is operating within a framework that has been built carefully over a very long time.

Why do it

The question that non-divers almost always ask is the obvious one: why?

Why bear all this expense, complexity, training and risk to spend time at the bottom of a cold, dark sea looking at a corroded structure that most people would struggle to identify as a ship?

Technical divers answer this differently, but the answers converge. The Lusitania is still down there. She is still largely recognisable as a structure. She is still carrying her cargo and her history and the unanswered questions that have followed her since 1915. Most people will never see her. Most people don’t know she can be seen.

At 90 metres, in the quiet that a rebreather makes possible, the history stops being something you read about and becomes something you are physically present inside. The scale of the wreck is not an abstraction. The corrosion, the collapse, the particular way a century of submersion has transformed iron and steel — it is all immediate and particular and real.

That is the answer. The wreck is there. The technology now exists to reach it and stay long enough to understand something of what it holds.

Dom’s channel exists, in part, to bring that experience to the people who will never make the dive themselves. His remarkable videos are the next best thing.

At 2:10 in the afternoon on May 7th, 1915, the RMS Lusitania was eighteen miles off the Old Head of Kinsale on the southern coast of Ireland when a single torpedo struck her starboard side. Seconds later, a second, larger explosion tore through the ship from within. The electrics failed four minutes after that, trapping passengers in lifts, below decks, and on the wrong side of bulkheads. Captain William Turner gave the order to abandon ship five minutes in. The Lusitania sank in eighteen minutes. 1,198 people died. 761 survived.

The wreck lies at 90 metres, roughly 18 kilometres south of the Irish coast. She has been there for 111 years. She is one of the most controversial shipwrecks in history, and she still has not given up all her secrets.

The ship

The RMS Lusitania was, at her launch in 1906, among the greatest ships ever built. Designed by naval architect Leonard Peskett for Cunard and constructed at the John Brown shipyard on the Clyde, she was built for one purpose: speed. She won the Blue Riband for the fastest Atlantic crossing in 1908. She made 202 transatlantic crossings over eight years. She was 239 metres long, carried nearly 2,000 passengers and crew, and was the kind of ship that made people feel that ocean travel had become, if not safe, at least magnificent.

When war was declared in 1914, the British government made provisions to commandeer her as an armed merchant cruiser if needed, but she continued in civilian service. On May 1st, 1915, she departed New York for Liverpool on what would be her final crossing. At the helm was Captain Turner. On board were 1,960 passengers and crew.

Germany had, since February 1915, declared the waters around Britain a war zone. Any shipping, military or civilian, was liable to be sunk without warning. A notice to this effect had been placed in American newspapers. Most passengers on the Lusitania didn’t seem to take it all that seriously.

The attack

SM U-20, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Walther Schwieger, had been operating in the waters off southern Ireland for several days before the Lusitania crossed his path. He was, by the morning of May 7th, running low on fuel and torpedoes and preparing to return home. Then, at around 1:20pm, one of his crew spotted a large vessel on the horizon.

U-20 manoeuvred into position. At a range of 700 metres, Schwieger ordered the firing of a single torpedo.

It struck the Lusitania near the bow. Schwieger, watching through his periscope, noted in his log an “extraordinarily large explosion” followed the first; a far larger explosion than a single torpedo could explain. That second explosion, which rocked through the ship from within and is believed to be what sent her to the bottom in under twenty minutes, has been the source of controversy ever since.

Captain Turner remained on the bridge until the water came up to meet him. He was pulled unconscious but alive from the sea three hours later. Meanwhile the U-20 slipped away. Behind her 1,198 people were left to drown or die of hypothermia in water that was 11 degrees Celsius.

What the wreck contains — and what it doesn’t tell us

The questions that have surrounded the Lusitania since she went down are not small ones.

The first is the question of that second explosion. One torpedo struck her. The Titanic, hit by an iceberg, took two hours and forty minutes to sink. The Lusitania was gone in eighteen. Something inside the ship contributed to her end, and nobody has ever definitively agreed on what it was.

Germany’s position, stated at the time, was that the Lusitania was carrying war munitions, that the torpedo detonated them, and that the sinking was therefore legitimate under the rules of war. The British government denied it, or at least evaded it, for decades. In 1982, government files from that year showed that officials were still privately uncomfortable about whether earlier denials had been accurate — one Foreign Office official noted that the subject might “literally blow up on us.”

The manifest tells part of the story. The Lusitania was carrying 4,200 cases of rifle cartridges, 1,250 cases of shrapnel shells, and aluminium powder used in the production of explosives. This was known, and it was listed. What the British government initially denied, then later conceded, was the presence of this cargo. Whether it caused the second explosion is another matter. Robert Ballard, who surveyed the wreck in 1993, concluded that the ammunition was still in the hold and had not detonated. The most widely accepted explanation for the second explosion is now a rupture of the ship’s steam lines or a coal-dust ignition; though neither has been proven beyond argument.

The second question concerns ownership and access. The Lusitania has changed hands several times since she sank. An American businessman named Gregg Bemis eventually acquired full ownership for a dollar in 1982, having first purchased a stake in 1968 for $2,400 from the Liverpool and London War Risks Insurance Association. He spent decades and millions of dollars fighting the Irish government for the right to excavate the site. Dives conducted under licence recovered live ammunition from the wreck (small arms rounds, physically retrieved from the seabed) which confirmed the munitions were there but did not settle the question of the second explosion.

The Irish government has designated the Lusitania a protected site. Diving on her requires permission. The wreck itself, by all accounts, has deteriorated significantly since Ballard mapped it in 1993. Sections of the hull have collapsed. The structure is fragile. A century of salt water, combined with the violence of the sinking itself, has left her in a condition very different from the photographs of her in her prime.

The wreck as a dive site

At 90 metres, the Lusitania sits well beyond the reach of recreational diving. Reaching her requires specialist certification and the kind of methodical, unhurried preparation that deep wreck diving demands.

What divers describe is a ship whose scale is vast and difficult to take in. She went down fast and she went down at a list, which means the wreck sits awkwardly on the seabed, recognisable but disordered. The bow slammed into the bottom with the ship still moving forward, driven by her own momentum.

She is not a comfortable wreck. She is a grave. 1,198 people died in those eighteen minutes, and the sea returned only 289 of them. The rest still lie inside or around her on the seabed, or were carried away by the tides long ago.

That is what lies at 90 metres.

Dom Robinson has dived the Lusitania. The experience, he has said, stays with you. There is a difference between reading about a ship and descending through cold, dark water to find one; seeing the scale of it, and the evidence of what happened on a May afternoon in 1915.

The full story of the Lusitania is not settled. The second explosion has never been definitively explained. The question of what the British government knew about the cargo and when they knew it remains contested. The wreck is deteriorating and will not be accessible forever.

But what is settled is the bare human arithmetic of the disaster: 1,960 people left New York. Only 762 of them were to step on land again The ship itself sank in eighteen minutes. Eighteen minutes is no time at all when you’re fighting for your life, and the lives of the people you love.

The rest of it, the munitions, the cover-up allegations, the question of whether the ship was sacrificed, is a conversation with 111 years on the clock and showing no sign of ending soon.

In November 1888, a steam cargo ship called the SS Nantes went down in the English Channel with twenty-three of her crew. Bodies washed ashore at Talland Bay and Looe on the Cornish coast. The Nantes herself, though, gone. No satellite navigation. No precise position. The sea had taken her and nobody knew exactly where.

Until Dom Robinson found her with a broken plate.

The sinking

The SS Nantes was built in Glasgow in 1874, a steam-powered cargo ship operated by the Cunard Steamship Company. She was fourteen years old when she died; not ancient by the standards of Victorian merchant shipping, but well-used. On the day of her last voyage she was carrying coal from Liverpool to Le Havre, a routine Channel crossing of the kind she would have made many times.

In November 1888, conditions in the Channel were poor. Somewhere in the grey water south-east of Plymouth, the Nantes met the Theodor Ruger, a German full-rigged sailing ship. The collision tore a hole in the Nantes’ hull.

What followed was a slow-motion catastrophe. The two ships were briefly locked together before separating. The impact had wrecked the Nantes’ lifeboats. The crew had no way off. For the next several hours, they worked to save their ship: stuffing mattresses into the gaping wound in the hull, bailing, doing everything they could think of. They bought themselves some time, but not enough.

The ship drifted and eventually went down with twenty-three of her crew still on board. Three others survived; two had managed to scramble across to the Theodor Ruger before the ships separated, and a third was picked up from the water hours later. The Theodor Ruger also sank, though her lifeboats were intact. Most of her crew got away.

The bodies that washed ashore told the story well enough. Beyond that, there was not much to go on. No GPS or precise recorded position. The Nantes had sunk somewhere in the Channel and nobody alive knew where.

The lead

The wreck was not entirely invisible to the historical record. It appeared in old newspapers, in Cunard’s files, in the notes of maritime historians. Dr Harry Bennett, an honorary associate professor at the University of Plymouth and a specialist in maritime history, knew the story. The Nantes, he later told the BBC, was one of those vessels that had been “known about but lost for a long period of time.”

What broke the impasse was a tip from the UK Hydrographic Office.

The Hydrographic Office maintains records of anomalies on the seabed around Britain — objects that sonar has spotted but that remain unidentified. There was such an anomaly, 30 miles south-east of Plymouth, at a depth of 75 metres. Dom heard about it and decided to go and take a look.

The dive itself, by Dom’s account, was not obviously promising. Deep, dark, cold. The Channel in autumn is not what anyone would call inviting. The wreck had been dived before by others and never identified. There was no particular reason to think this visit would be different.

Then, towards the end of the dive, Dom spotted a piece of crockery on the seabed.

The plate

He brought it up.

Back on the surface, he turned it over. On the back, a stamp: Cunard Steamship Company.

That is the moment the puzzle started to come together. Cunard had operated relatively few steam cargo ships of the right era in these waters. The dimensions of the wreck, roughly 260 feet, confirmed against the Hydrographic Office records, matched those of the Nantes precisely. The technology visible in the wreck, the cargo, the location: all consistent. Further dives recovered additional Cunard crockery from the same site.

Dr Bennett later described the identification as “the underwater archaeological equivalent of a needle in a haystack.” For Dom, it was rather more straightforward.

“Even though the wreck had been dived before,” he said, “it was never identified, and this small piece of broken plate allowed us to do exactly that.”

The Nantes had been found. A Victorian cargo ship that had sunk in a night-time collision in the Channel had been sitting at 75 metres for 136 years waiting for someone to pick up a piece of crockery and read the back of it.

What the wreck holds

Dom describes the Nantes as a ship frozen in time. At that depth in the Channel, many of the structural features of the vessel are still intact. The cargo of coal is still there, scattered across the seabed. The story of the collision is legible in the wreck itself, the damage, the disorder, the evidence of a ship that went down quickly in the end after hours of desperate effort.

There is something particular about a wreck like this one. It is not a naval vessel. It is not a famous ship. It is a working cargo ship — one of hundreds that crossed the Channel every year in the 1880s, carrying coal and timber and goods from port to port, crewed by men whose names barely survive in the historical record. The Nantes is the kind of ship that history routinely forgets.

Twenty-three men died on her. Their bodies washed ashore on the Cornish coast and were found by local people. It’s an event that deserves more than a footnote in a list of Victorian maritime casualties.

Finding the wreck does not change what happened. But it does change what we can know about it. The Nantes is no longer simply lost. She has a position now. She has dimensions and cargo and crockery and a hole in her hull that her crew spent several hours trying to fill with mattresses.

She has a story that can be told properly.

Dom published his account of the discovery on his YouTube channel Deep Wreck Diver, and it attracted exactly the kind of attention a story like this deserves, from CNN, from the BBC, from maritime history communities on both sides of the Atlantic. Dr Bennett’s “needle in a haystack” line travelled widely. So did the image of the broken plate that cracked the mystery.

The discovery had been made in the autumn of 2024. By the time the world heard about it, Dom had already moved on to his next wreck.

That is, after all, what he does.

Most things you buy on Facebook Marketplace are a gamble. A bicycle with one functioning brake or a set of golf clubs from a man who is reluctant to explain why he is selling them.

Dom Robinson bought a World War One shipwreck.

The SS Almond Branch has spent the last 109 years resting 58 metres below the surface of the English Channel, off the Cornish coast near Mevagissey. She weighs 3,000 tonnes, stretches 330 feet from bow to stern, and she cost Dom £300. He’d bought bikes off Facebook Marketplace with more hassle.

But this was the purchase that launched a thousand headlines. The BBC ran it. Popular Science ran it. A story about a diver buying a piece of rusting Victorian ironwork for slightly less than the cost of a weekend away turned out to be precisely the kind of news the internet had been waiting for.

But the story behind that headline is worth telling properly. Because the Almond Branch is more than a novelty purchase. She is a real ship with a real history, crewed by real men, sunk by a weapon that killed one of them, and she has been sitting on the seabed while the twentieth century happened 50m above her.

The ship

The SS Almond Branch was built in 1896, a steam-powered cargo ship of the kind that plied the world’s trade routes for decades without attracting attention. She was not glamorous or fast. She carried cargo all over the world in the unglamorous, essential way that keeps civilisations running. The maritime equivalent of a delivery van.

By the time she met her end, she had been requisitioned as a defensively-armed merchant ship. The British government, facing the reality of unrestricted submarine warfare, had begun bolting guns to civilian vessels. A gun mount still survives on the wreck today, though the gun itself is long gone.

On November 27th, 1917, the Almond Branch was sailing off Dodman Point when a torpedo from the German submarine UB-57 struck her. One man died in the sinking.

UB-57 was a formidable machine. Commissioned just four months earlier, she had already sunk dozens of merchant ships across the English Channel and the Western Approaches. Her commander that autumn was Kapitänleutnant Otto Steinbrinck, one of the most decorated U-boat officers of the war. The Almond Branch was, for UB-57, simply another entry in the log.

The submarine’s own end came nine months later. On August 14th, 1918, three months before the Armistice, she struck a mine in the English Channel and went down with all hands. Thirty-four men. It was only in April 2025, almost simultaneously with Dom’s purchase of the Almond Branch, that UB-57 was positively identified on the seabed. History has a way of surfacing at poetic moments.

How a shipwreck ends up on Facebook Marketplace

This requires a brief explanation of one of Britain’s more eccentric institutions.

Every shipwreck has a legal owner under British law. When the Almond Branch sank, the government processed an insurance claim and became the legal owner of the wreck. When they decided, in 1978, to recoup some of their losses, they sold her into private hands. The buyer hoped to find something valuable among the remains. He found, as Dom later described it, a big pile of rusting iron.

Decades passed. The wreck sat on the seabed. The original buyer apparently got on with his life, and that big pile of rusting iron became something he was open to passing along.

Which is how it ended up on Facebook Marketplace at £300.

The official body responsible for recording all of this is known as the Receiver of Wreck, a post that has existed in various forms since the medieval period, and which, until 1997, came with the statutory power to “hurt, maim or kill” anyone who obstructed the receiver in their duties. The modern version is rather more bureaucratic. After Dom completed the purchase, the Receiver sent him a letter confirming he was now the legal owner of the SS Almond Branch.

He has kept the letter. It seems like the sort of document one ought to frame.

What £300 actually buys you

It does not buy you a diving site you can fence off. Other divers were visiting the Almond Branch before Dom bought her, and they will carry on now. Ownership of a wreck in British waters is not the same as ownership of land, you cannot exclude anyone.

It does not buy you anything of obvious monetary value. The gun is gone. The cargo has turned into fossilised barrels (of what, we don’t know). What remains is iron, encrusted with a century of marine growth, home to shoals of fish and the odd curious seal.

What it does buy you is the right to be consulted if anything significant is found. If a diver recovers an artefact from the wreck, they must report it to the Receiver within 28 days. The Receiver then contacts the owner — Dom — to ask whether he wants to keep it or relinquish it.

The ship’s bell, for instance, is missing. Someone took it at some point in the last century. If it ever turns up, it goes to Dom first. He has made his position on this clear: hands off his bell.

It also buys something harder to quantify. Dom had already dived the Almond Branch before he bought her, with his friend Rick Ayrton, in January. He knew exactly what he was getting. A pile of rusting iron at 58 metres, resting in the cold dark off the Cornish coast. But there is something about swimming around a wreck and thinking: this is mine. It is a feeling that makes sense only to a certain kind of person — the kind who spends their weekends in cold water looking at things that have been broken for a century.

Dom’s wife Suzi was furious, incidentally.

Why the story went everywhere

The purchase attracted attention from the BBC, from American science publications, from diving forums and local history websites and places Dom had never heard of. It was, briefly, the sort of story that restores one’s faith in the internet.

The reason, when you think about it, is obvious. It is the most unexpected sentence in the world: you can buy a World War One shipwreck on Facebook Marketplace. People scroll past ambitious listings for a pre-loved mattress, and somewhere in that stream there was a piece of the Great War. The story of a torpedo strike, a man who died in 1917, and a German submarine that would be sunk nine months later.

Facebook Marketplace contains multitudes.

The government stopped selling shipwrecks around twenty years ago, so opportunities of this kind are genuinely rare. Dom had always fancied owning one — it is the sort of ambition that sounds eccentric until you explain it, and then sounds either more or less eccentric depending on your audience. When the listing appeared, there was only one possible response.

“I’m having that.”

The SS Almond Branch will stay where she is, 58 metres below the surface, exactly where the UB-57 left her on that November morning in 1917. She is home now to marine life that would have baffled the crew who sailed her, and she carries a history that most people driving past the Cornish coast will never think to wonder about.

Dom has a video on his channel in which you can see the wreck for yourself — what she looks like now, a century on, and what remains of the story she carries. It is well worth your time.