HMS Bacchante (F69): The Frigate That Survived the Cod Wars Unscathed, Then Sank on Purpose

HMS Bacchante (F69)

A Frigate Built on the Tyne

HMS Bacchante was built by Vickers-Armstrongs on the Tyne, launched on 29 February 1968 and commissioned on 17 October 1969, a Leander-class frigate fitted with the familiar combination of twin 4.5-inch guns, a Sea Cat missile launcher and a Limbo anti-submarine mortar. She joined the Standing Naval Force Atlantic in 1970, taking part in NATO exercises and port visits, and deployed to the West Indies the following year, exercising alongside HMS Ark Royal and the American carrier USS America, before serving as West Indies Guardship in 1973.

The Frigate the Cod Wars Couldn't Touch

Bacchante served with the Fishery Protection Squadron during both the Second and Third Cod Wars with Iceland, and earned a genuinely notable distinction in the process: she was one of only two Royal Navy frigates to emerge from the entire dispute without a single scratch, a considerable achievement given how many of her sister ships came away from the Cod Wars with dented hulls and collision damage. She celebrated rather more peacefully in July 1976, visiting Wilmington and New York for the United States Bicentennial celebrations.

Gibraltar Guardship in a Year of War

In 1981 she carried out a second Armilla Patrol deployment to the Persian Gulf, visiting Mogadishu and Muscat, before becoming Gibraltar Guardship in 1982, the very year the Falklands War broke out. She deployed to the South Atlantic during the conflict, and her crew subsequently provided disaster recovery assistance in the war's aftermath, unglamorous but valuable work helping the islands recover once the fighting had ended.

A New Zealand Wreck by Design

Bacchante was decommissioned from the Royal Navy in 1982 and sold to the Royal New Zealand Navy, recommissioned as HMNZS Wellington, going on to serve New Zealand for a further eighteen years before her own decommissioning in 2000. Rather than being scrapped, she was purchased for a symbolic one dollar by the Sink F69 Trust and deliberately sunk as an artificial reef and dive attraction near Island Bay, Wellington, on 13 November 2005, a genuinely fitting final act for a ship that had once made a point of coming through actual naval confrontation entirely undamaged, before finally, and quite deliberately, going down on her own terms.