Royal Yacht Britannia’s leak leads to a listing

Firefighters were called in to pump water from the celebrated boat, just months after it played host to Zara Phillips’s pre-wedding celebrations, after it suddenly began taking on water.

Officials raised the alarm when they noticed the ship dramatically “listing” starboard after its mooring ropes were lifted, prior to it being taken to a dry dock facility in Leith for repairs to its hull.

A broken seal in a recently installed new door in Britannia, which had been moved just once over the past 14 years since Leith won a fiercely contested campaign to secure the vessel, was blamed for the emergency, which involved more than 20 firefighters.

However, it is not thought to have caused any damage to the vessel, which was taken out of service in 1997. It closed to the public on 31 December for a month-long overhaul of the hull below the waterline. The removal operation, which had begun around 9am yesterday, was halted two hours later when the listing was spotted, and the fire brigade were at the scene until after 2pm. However, a short time later the vessel was able to finally get her journey underway and arrived safely at the neighbouring Imperial Dry Dock around 3:30pm.

Officials at the Royal Yacht Britannia Trust, which was set up to run the vessel as a tourist attraction, later described the incident as “a minor hiccup”. However, four fire engines and a major incident unit raced to the scene amid fears the vessel could have tipped over into the water.

Lynda Dalgleish, head of marketing at Britannia, said: “The vessel had been expected to list over slightly, but it was more than expected and that meant the new door that had been installed was below the water line and there was a leak.

“However, it was only a minor hiccup, the operation to move her went very well, and she’s arrived safely now and is looking wonderful in her new home in the dry dock.”

The door thought to have sprung a leak had been installed to allow visitors to walk out from inside the hull on to a pontoon on the water beside the vessel’s starboard side, where they can also view the former royal racing yacht Bloodhound, which has been in Leith Docks for more than a year.

Chief executive Bob Downie said: “When we were removing the mooring ropes the ship moved four degrees to starboard.

“This meant that new access watertight doors to our pontoons were below the water level. There has been a leak in the seals in those doors which was accentuating the list.

“Because we have limited shore power, we asked the fire brigade to provide us with some assistance in correcting the ship’s ballast.

“This has caused a delay in the process, but Britannia was secure at all times.”

Graham Inglis, group commander at Lothian and Borders Fire and Rescue Service, said the main priority of the operation was to get Britannia fully upright before the water inside the vessel could be pumped out.

He said: “They had a listing ship and they needed to move water from the starboard side to the port side to bring it up to the vertical. We get involved in ship fires and this concept of listing is not unusual to the fire service.

“If we were dealing with a fire, you would get a listing ship. The concepts and the principles of what we’re trying to do here are known to us and we train for that.”