Alert

Little has been published about this site, so some details are uncertain. If you can add to its story, please email [email protected].

History

The Alert was one of the small, single-masted Bermuda sloops built of local cedar, the workhorse boats of the 19th-century island. Craft like her, typically 25 to 30 ft long, were used for fishing, for carrying freight around the islands and as pilot boats meeting incoming ships.

In March 1877 the Alert went out on a fishing trip and did not come home. The account handed down by the Bermudian treasure hunter and wreck historian Teddy Tucker, and printed in Daniel and Denise Berg's 1991 dive guide, is that nothing more was heard of her for about a month, until she was found lying where she had gone down among the north reefs in some 40 ft of water. None of her crew survived.

The Alert was one of the wrecks chosen for Bermuda's 'Ships Wrecked in Bermuda' postage stamp series of 1986-90, where she stands for the island's traditional cedar fishing sloop.

Diving the wreck today

There is no published dive guide or position for the Alert, and she does not appear on the Government's list of buoyed or protected dive sites. A small wooden sloop on the exposed northern reefs would leave very little to see today beyond possible ballast stones. Treat this as a historical entry rather than a dive you can book.