HMS Hydra (A144): From Chatham Navy Days to the Indonesian Navy

HMS Hydra (A144)

Built on the Clyde

HMS Hydra was built by Yarrow and Company at Blythswood, Glasgow, laid down in May 1964, launched on 14 July 1965 and commissioned into the Royal Navy on 5 May 1966, the third of the Hecla-class ocean survey vessels alongside HMS Hecla, HMS Hecate and HMS Herald. She measured 260 feet in length, displaced 2,733 tons at full load, and carried a crew of 118, powered by three Paxman Ventura diesel engines driving a single propeller through an electric motor for a top trial speed of 14.5 knots and a genuinely impressive range of 20,000 nautical miles at a cruising 9 knots.

A Record Crowd at Chatham

HMS Hydra underwent five separate docking periods at Chatham for refits and maintenance between 1967 and 1971, and in 1968 took part in Chatham Dockyard Navy Days, an event that drew a record crowd of 65,000 visitors over the two-day event, a genuinely striking illustration of just how much public interest the Royal Navy could generate during this period, even for a comparatively unglamorous survey vessel rather than a fighting ship.

Two Decades of Survey Work

HMS Hydra spent two decades engaged in the patient, essential work her design was built for, charting coastlines and ocean depths around the world to keep Admiralty charts accurate and up to date for the Royal Navy and merchant shipping alike, unglamorous but genuinely vital duty carried out largely away from public attention outside occasional set-piece events like her appearance at Chatham.

A New Life as Dewi Kembar

HMS Hydra was placed on the Royal Navy's disposal list in 1986 and handed over to Indonesia on 18 April that year for refit, before being commissioned into the Indonesian Navy on 10 September 1986 as the survey ship Dewi Kembar, continuing the very same kind of hydrographic work she had carried out for two decades under British colours, now serving Indonesian waters instead, a genuinely fitting second career for a ship whose entire purpose had always been making the seas safer to navigate, regardless of whose flag she happened to be flying.