Diver buys First World War shipwreck on Facebook
Dom Robinson, a 53-year-old shipwreck enthusiast, came across an advert for the SS Almond Branch in January 2025 and decided to buy it.
The steam-powered cargo ship has been on the seabed off the coast of Cornwall since it was torpedoed by a German submarine on Nov 27 1917.
Mr Robinson, who runs a diving YouTube channel called Deep Wreck Diver, contacted the seller of the wreck on Facebook, who happened to live nearby.
The project manager from Portsmouth said: 'I've bought bikes off Facebook Marketplace with more hassle.
'It's a relatively well known wreck in the local area so I've dived it before, so I knew what I was getting when I bought it.'
After the purchase, Mr Robinson received a letter from a government official known as the Receiver of Wreck, stating that he is the legal owner of the SS Almond Branch.
In the UK, every shipwreck has an official owner – whether it is the state or an individual.
A large number of shipwrecks are privately owned after the government sold a number of them to be salvaged after the end of the Second World War.
Mr Robinson now owns the wreck, although anyone is free to dive down to see it.
He said: 'The government stopped selling shipwrecks 20-odd years ago, but I always quite fancied owning one ... I was like 'bingo, this is my opportunity to own a shipwreck!'
'It's still a pile of rusting iron, but you're swimming around a pile of rusting iron and going 'yeah, this is my pile of rusting iron!''
Mr Robinson has identified 20 to 25 shipwrecks and has been diving since he was a child. He has discovered many lost ships, including three Royal Navy ships.
'It's really nice because each shipwreck has got a story associated with it. That's something I find particularly rewarding,' he said
Mr Robinson recovers the shipwrecks by scanning the seabeds around the UK and investigating the anomalies he finds.
Referring to the SS Almond Branch, he said: 'This one is said to have general cargo, which means that they put all sorts of bits and pieces in it.
'There's a gun mount, but the gun isn't there, so I'd love to know what happened to that.'
Diving to the ship, which sits approximately 50 metres under the sea, brings many risks, including decompression illness from returning to the surface too quickly.
He said: 'You have to come up very slowly. If you were to come up immediately you would almost certainly get decompression illness, which is where the bubbles of gas in your bloodstream can get lodged in your brain and other parts of your body.'
SS Almond Branch was a defensively-armed British Merchant ship, meaning that it would have been equipped with some weaponry for protection, though it mainly transported cargo.
Before it was torpedoed, it would have travelled all over the world. There are also records of it crashing into a bridge in Portland, Oregon.
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