Dredged mine safely detonated off Kent

It took seven hours to safely dislodge the wartime device, containing 1,500 lb of high explosive, which was trapped in the teeth of the vessel’s drag head. The air-dropped ‘GC’ mine was brought to the surface by the dredger six miles north of Sheerness.

Before carrying out a controlled explosion, a four man Navy team from Southern Diving Unit 2 in Portsmouth had to carefully remove the device from its precarious location..

CPO Ian ‘Scouse’ Fleming, who led the team, worked for seven hours through the night in atrocious conditions to safely extract the mine and hoist it onto the dredger’s upper deck.

He said: “I had to crawl along a pipe to reach the mine to attach chains. It was a confined space and waves were splashing all around me. The fuses had been bashed about a bit and were quite dangerous and the explosives were exposed.It was a tiring operation, one of the most testing I have been involved in, but everything went to plan.”

The WW2 device, which measured two metres long by 50cm diameter, was towed two miles further out to sea and dropped to a depth of about ten metres. A controlled explosion then caused a 76m plume, which was clearly visible from the shore.

Accompanying CPO Fleming on the task were leading diver Lewis Watson and AB divers Peter Birse and Josh Spibey.