HMT Gulland

HMT Gulland in November 1943

HMT Gulland was an s built for the Royal Navy during the Second World War for a variety of tasks, including anti-submarine patrol. She was launched placed on the disposal list after the war and sold to Belgian owners in March 1946.

Design

The Isles-class ships were long, with a beam of and a draught of at deep load. They displaced was at normal load, which increased to at deep load. A single cylindrical boiler fed steam to a triple-expansion steam engine that drove a single propeller shaft. The engine was rated at which gave the ships a speed of . They carried up to of coal and had a complement of 35–40 officers and ratings.

Postwar

The following year the ship changed hands and was renamed Henken and two years later sold to Arab Navigation & Transport Co. in Aden and renamed Arab Trader. On 13 April 1951 the ship grounded three miles north of Mombasa, Kenya, while on a voyage from Aden to Mauritius with a cargo of lentils. Within a day or two the heavy seas flooded the engine and boiler room, and the wreck settled on the reef with the main deck awash at high water. With a cargo that was now worthless and no one in Mombasa capable of salvaging the ship, she was abandoned as a total loss. The wreck broke up in the surf and at a later date the remains were demolished with explosives. What was left of the wreck was rediscovered in the 1970s on an extremely low tide in front of the Reef Hotel consisting of a pile of steel plate and machinery on the edge of the reef at its current location.