Baygitano Wreck, Lyme Regis, Dorset, UK

Baygitano Wreck, Lyme Regis, Dorset, UK

Built in South Shields in 1905, it was as the Cayo Gitano that the 3073-ton schooner-rigged steamer, 99m long with a beam of 14m, first worked as a collier. Just before the start of World War One her new owner, the Bay Steamship Co of London, replaced the Cayo with Bay, in keeping with the rest of its fleet, writes Kendall McDonald.

There was plenty of work for colliers in the war years, particularly running Welsh coal to power French war factories. It was when returning from one such trip that Captain Arthur Murrison lost the Baygitano to a U-boat's torpedo.

He had been ordered to bring the vessel back from Le Havre in ballast on 18 March, 1918 to reload. He was to join a Channel convoy and then follow the coastal-traffic mine-swept route to Cardiff. It was a voyage he had made almost weekly throughout the war.

From Lyme Bay he followed orders and took his ship close in to shore. This was meant to avoid German U-boats, because it was well known that they didn't like shallow water. Sadly nobody had told Oberleutnant Johannes Ries. Commanding UC-77, he was waiting in the shallows a mile south of Lyme Regis.

Captain Murrison stopped zig-zagging once close in, mainly because of the heavy mist lying over most of the inshore waters. But the mist didn't hide the collier from the periscope of UC-77 and Ries fired one torpedo from a bow tube at 11.45am. It blew a big hole in the port side of the Baygitano‘s No 4 hold, and Murrison gave the order to abandon ship.

All but two of the 37 men got away in the boats, along with the two Naval gunners who had manned the stern gun. The missing men were the Fourth Engineer, killed in the engine-room, and the First Mate, last seen returning to his cabin for a pair of boots.

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