City of Edinburgh Wreck Map

Switha

Blown up to disperse her fuel oil, the wreck of Switha stood above the surface off Herwit Rock, at the south-east corner of Inchkeith, for years before she broke up and disappeared beneath the water around 2001. She had been a steam-powered fisheries patrol vessel driven by a triple-expansion engine, transferred to the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries for Scotland in 1971, renamed Switha and based at Leith. Returning there at the end of a sixteen-day patrol, she met a Force 9 gale and a heavy swell on her approach to the dock gates and ran hard aground. A Coastguard helicopter lifted thirteen of the twenty-five men aboard; tugs could not move her and pumps could not keep pace with the water flooding her holed hull. Scattered metal remains in the shallows off the rocks, showing at exceptionally low spring tides.