The Segontium (Wreck)

 ship wreck, interesting place, invisible

"She was a dodgy boat. Her stability was suspect. But then, she was designed by engineers, so what can you expect?" Captain Raymond Phillips, who had been one of the Segontium's captains, was talking to me about the ship.
He sounded not the slightest bit upset, and indeed was exceptionally cheerful, when I told him that amateur divers often visit his former command as it lies upright on the bottom of Caernarvon Bay.
I have rarely had so much trouble in tracing a wreck's history as I did with the Segontium. This trouble was largely caused by someone ill-informed putting on a website: "Segondium (sic) did not sink in Caernarvon Bay, after a spell in the Caernarvon Maritime Museum, she was scrapped".
This statement hid her true story for some time. Even though the Caernarvon Maritime Museum curator said it was rubbish and that the museum had never had the vessel, the tale sent me careering around in Welsh trawling circles.
Guildhall Museum in London as usual turned out to be the shipwreck-researcher's best friend, and dug out details of the Segontium from its vast Lloyd's marine collection.
The vessel was built for the Navy at Faversham in Kent and launched into the Swale in 1943. She was designed for use as armament stores tender C165 and spent her war supplying shells and other ammunition to big warships and convoy escorts.
At the end of the war C165 was converted. She appears on the Mercantile Navy list of 1976 as a 192 ton British steel motor vessel with fishing-trawler classification and her port of registry London. She was later owned by Welsh Seafoods of Bangor, Caernarvonshire.
This information sent me back to Wales, and it wasn't long before I found Captain Phillips. He told me that well before he took command she was named Segontium after an ancient Roman fort in Caernarvon. Later she was again converted, this time into a mussel-dredger. "It wasn't a very popular kind of fishing, as she was equipped to hoover up the mussels by using a water dredge," said the Captain.
How did the 65ft dredger finally sink? Captain Phillips was not aboard for her last voyage in 1984, which was with a scratch crew taking her to be scrapped. "She foundered in rough weather," he said. "Water just came in and that was that". All aboard were saved.