Lost 1955 - Cargo steamer
The Wychwood was a modern British steamer, barely five years old when she was lost. S.P. Austin & Son built her at Sunderland in 1950 for the London collier owners Wm. France, Fenwick & Co.; she measured 302.5 ft with a 45 ft beam and 2,506 gross tons.
At 3.17 p.m. on 11 August 1955, bound from Walton, Nova Scotia, to Port of Spain, Trinidad, with a cargo of barytes (a heavy mineral used in drilling mud and paint), she ran onto the Western Ledge Flats in 18 ft of water, 8.5 miles west-north-west of Gibbs Hill Lighthouse. Members of the Pompano Beach Club watched her go aground, and one of them rowed out to her in a dinghy. After the USS Valcour failed to move her, the US Navy tug Papago and the US Coast Guard cutter Rockaway pulled her off the next day. She was leaking badly, but her pumps were coping, and with her rudder jammed hard over she was towed, partly stern-first, round to St George's.
Hurricane Diane was now approaching. On the evening of 13 August the Wychwood was anchored at Five Fathom Hole and most of her 28 crew were taken off; Captain Aaron Thompson, Chief Officer J. Begg and Chief Steward A. Carter stayed aboard to the end and were brought ashore by crashboat after a 54-hour ordeal. On 14 August she sank in Five Fathom Hole, and the Board of Trade moored a flashing 'WRECK' buoy over her. No one was lost - the ship's kitten, born aboard, was the only casualty. Local boatmen helped themselves to her cargo and stores until Customs stepped in. The Marine Court of Inquiry, under Sir Bayard Dill, found the master negligent - he had no detailed chart of Bermuda - and thought she would probably have been saved had the crew stayed aboard; a Board of Trade inspector's evidence that better salvage methods could have been used, and the fact that local tugs were not called, caused a public row. Because she was a hazard to shipping, the wreck was later blown apart, and her remains lie scattered on the seabed.
Berg (1991) describes her as blown up and scattered on the seabed in about 50-60 ft at Five Fathom Hole; the Royal Gazette in 1955 gave 40-50 ft.