Commander Yvonne Gray from North Yorkshire was in charge of the £60m New Zealand Navy vessel which sank on Sunday. Abandoning ship was the “right action”
A New Zealand naval ship under the command of a former Royal Navy officer has sunk after striking a reef.
The 5,740-tonne HMNZS Manawanui went down on Sunday morning off Samoa. It is the first time New Zealand’s navy has lost a ship in peacetime. An inquiry will be launched to find out why the hydrographic vessel under Commander Yvonne Gray catastrophically ran aground and caught fire near the island of Upolu on Saturday.
All 75 crew and passengers were rescued. Two people needed hospital treatment for minor injuries, one with a dislocated shoulder and another with a hurt back, according to local reports. The decision of Commander Gray to abandon ship has been praised as life-saving. “She made the decision and it was the right decision,” said Rear-Admiral Garin Golding, chief of the Royal New Zealand Navy.
Gray, from Harrogate, North Yorkshire, moved to New Zealand in 2012 and took command of the Manawanui in December 2022. She had previously served on Royal Navy frigates and minehunters, reports The Times.
“This is a ship that, unfortunately, is pretty much gone,” Judith Collins, the New Zealand defence minister, told a press conference. “This could have been a truly terrible day,” if there had been loss of life, Collins said. “But actually it is a bad day.”
A power outage may have caused the ship to run aground, the defence minister suggested. According to a report on 1 News, the defence minister said: “We need to find out what happened, apparently it lost power, I’m aware of that, and ended up aground on the reef.”
She said the Chief of Navy told her the Court of Inquiry had already begun its investigation. The results will be known in a matter of weeks, or possibly months if it is more complex. The specialist vessel grounded about a mile offshore while surveying a reef. The ship was built in 2003 and operated as an oil and gas survey vessel by a Norwegian firm before being acquired by New Zealand in 2018.
“It’s not a battleship. It was never built as that. It was built for diving support and for surveying,” the defence minister said. The New Zealand Navy was “really hurting” after the sinking, she added.
The 85m-long ship boat was engulfed in fire and was badly in choppy seas before going down. The ship sank at 8.45am. Witnesses described seeing the fire take hold and then burning brightly. Villagers were said to be “visibly upset”. Many were in church at the time and said they had never seen any similar incident in their lifetimes.
