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.

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.

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.

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.

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, that captures the essential purpose of her survey work: 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 July 2026, HMS Magpie had moved on to a fresh stretch of coastline, running roughly two months of survey work in the approaches to Harwich Haven on the Essex coast, a Notice to Mariners confirms — 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.