HMS Magpie (H130): Surveying the Mary Rose's Own Resting Place

A Modern Catamaran for a Traditional Job

HMS Magpie was ordered on 18 August 2017 and laid down that September, built by the Irish shipbuilder Safehaven Marine in Cork using their Wildcat 60 catamaran design, before Atlas Elektronik UK installed her mission survey equipment.

Accepted by the Royal Navy in May 2018 and commissioned on 28 June that year, she displaces a modest 37 tonnes and is capable of over 25 knots on her twin diesel engines, a nimble little vessel built for precise inshore and coastal survey work rather than any conventional combat role.

The name carries some history of its own: an earlier HMS Magpie, a Black Swan-class sloop, was commanded by a young Duke of Edinburgh from September 1950 to July 1951, his only seagoing command before duty called him ashore for good.

Taking Over From HMS Gleaner

HMS Magpie was procured under Project Vahana, a programme authorising up to 38 smaller Royal Navy workboats, and at 18 metres she stands as the largest and, notably, the only commissioned vessel to come out of that entire series.

She replaced HMS Gleaner as the Royal Navy's primary inshore survey platform, taking on the mantle of a role that had, under her predecessor, already built a strong reputation for precise, essential hydrographic work in Britain's coastal waters.

Gleaner had racked up an impressive 35 years of service by the time she paid off in February 2018, technically not even a full "HMS" but a Motor Survey Launch, and smaller still at just 15 metres. Once stripped of her survey equipment, she went the way of many a retired workboat: sold in 2019 for £40,000 through the online marketplace Apollo Duck, a rather understated final chapter for a vessel that had spent her last active months mapping the waters around Portsmouth and Rosyth ahead of HMS Queen Elizabeth's arrival.

Kitted Out for the Job

Procured under a £48 million contract awarded to Atlas Elektronik UK, Magpie is powered by twin 900-horsepower diesels driving steerable waterjets rather than propellers, letting her spin on the spot or reverse smoothly into a berth without a rudder or exposed propeller to snag on debris in shallow water. Her survey suite, all supplied by Kongsberg, pairs a multibeam echo sounder capable of covering up to 270 square metres of seabed a second, roughly a Wembley pitch every half minute, with a towed side-scan sonar rated to depths of a kilometre.

Below decks she is a considerable upgrade on the cramped Gleaner, with proper workstations for up to six hydrographers, bunks for nine, a full galley and, rather charmingly, a washing machine squeezed in somewhere among it all, fitted out for voyages of up to a week at a stretch.

Surveying Portsmouth for the Carriers

HMS Magpie's first major task was a continuation of the work her predecessor had already begun, surveying Portsmouth Harbour ahead of deployments by the Royal Navy's new aircraft carriers, exactly the kind of painstaking, unglamorous groundwork that made the safe operation of the fleet's largest and most valuable ships possible in the first place.

Mapping the Mary Rose

HMS Magpie went on to conduct surveys of the wreck site of the Mary Rose, Henry VIII's celebrated warship lost in the Solent in 1545 and famously raised in 1982, a notably fitting task for a modern survey vessel to carry out on behalf of one of the most significant historic wrecks in British naval history.

It is worth saying how the Mary Rose came to be there, because the site Magpie is working over is not a museum exhibit. On 19 July 1545 a French fleet was in the Solent, troops were ashore on the Isle of Wight, and Henry VIII was watching from Southsea Castle as his ships came out of Portsmouth to meet them. The Mary Rose had been built in Portsmouth in 1511 and had thirty-four years of service behind her.

A gust caught her as she turned. She heeled far enough to put her open starboard gun ports under the water, filled, and went down in front of the King and everybody else on the shore. Something like four hundred and fifteen people were aboard. About thirty came out. Anti-boarding netting rigged over the upper deck, which was there to keep the French off, is generally reckoned to have kept most of her own men in.

Divers found her again in 1971 and the hull came up on 11 October 1982, watched live by an audience of millions, along with something like nineteen thousand objects preserved in Solent mud. What is left on the seabed is a scheduled monument and a war grave, which is why a survey has to be done properly. Why it had to be done at all, with the harbour approaches being dredged for two 65,000-tonne carriers, is set out in the article on HMS Gleaner (H86), Magpie's predecessor, who began the work.

There is a neatness to it that is easy to miss. The Mary Rose was built at Portsmouth and sank in sight of it. Magpie is based at Devonport but spends a good deal of her working life in the same few miles of water, running a multibeam sounder over the spot where four hundred men of Henry VIII's navy still lie, so that the largest warships Britain has ever built can get in and out of the harbour that built her.

She also investigated a sixteenth-century French galley off the Isle of Wight, continuing a quiet but particularly valuable tradition of Royal Navy survey vessels contributing directly to maritime archaeology alongside their more routine navigational and operational work.

Eight Months Around Britain

In 2022 Magpie undertook her most extensive deployment yet, leaving Devonport in March and not returning until October. Three months of that epic circuit went on the River Tyne alone, her small crew of nine building close ties with the Royal Navy Reservists of HMS Calliope in Gateshead along the way, before she moved on to survey the vast new South Harbour development at Aberdeen and, for a change of scenery, sailed the Caledonian Canal and Loch Ness.

"The River Tyne is a large, busy and complex body of water with depths subject to regular change due to silting and tidal action," her then commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Hywel Morgan, said at the time. "Magpie's work is key to maintaining a sound understanding of these waters."

Still Charting the Waters

HMS Magpie remains in active service today, homeported at Devonport, carrying a motto, Lux in Tenebris Lucet, meaning Light Shines into Darkness, personally endorsed by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, shortly before his death in 2021 in tribute to the earlier HMS Magpie he had once commanded, and one that captures the essential purpose of her survey work just as neatly: illuminating what lies unseen beneath the water for the benefit of every larger, less specialised ship that follows in her wake.

New Waters, 2026

By the summer of 2026 Magpie had turned her attention to the Thames Estuary, spending three months gathering what her current commanding officer, Lieutenant Daisy Nelson, called "the foundations necessary to ensure the River Thames and the strategic ports therein are able to remain safe and open," with particular focus on the waters around London Gateway, now the UK's second-busiest container port and handler of around a third of the country's containerised trade.

The survey also took in HMS President, the Royal Navy's reserve unit base at St Katharine Dock by Tower Bridge, where spring tides can push up to 30 million tonnes of water past the jetties in a single cycle; Magpie's team turned around a full three-dimensional picture of the riverbed there in a matter of hours. By late August she had shifted focus again, moving to the East Coast to survey military shipwrecks for the Salvage and Marine Operations organisation, among them the WWI light cruiser HMS Arethusa, sunk by a mine off Harwich in 1916, work that overlapped with a roughly two-month survey of the approaches to Harwich Haven a Notice to Mariners confirms had begun that July, a new patch of water added to a portfolio that already took in Portsmouth, the Mary Rose and the Isle of Wight.

This is a live article which will be updated when more information is available.
Last checked for updates: 24 October 2026