HMNZS Wellington was a retired Leander class frigate of the Royal Navy and the Royal New Zealand Navy. She was originally commissioned in 1969 for the Royal Navy as HMS Bacchante. On October 4th 1982, at Portsmouth, England, the Leander Class frigate, F69, was commissioned into the Royal New Zealand Navy and renamed HMNZS Wellington. She then set sail on her delivery voyage to New Zealand. She arrived at Auckland in December of that year and, for the next 36 months, underwent an extended refit to modernise her. Extensive refits were required to remove asbestos resulting in the ship re-entering active service only in 1987. Following re-commissioning, one of her first official duties was to be present at the funeral of Rear Admiral L J Tempero, CB, RNZN in 1987. Over the next 17 years, HMNZS Wellington was to sail to almost every part of the globe serving mankind and her adopted country to the very best of her ability.
HMNZS Wellington was deliberately sunk off the south coast of Wellington, New Zealand, at Island Bay. She is now a wreck visitable by divers for about 100 years while slowly rusting away.
Although the ship was due to be sunk at 3pm, 12 November 2005, this was delayed for 24 hours due to less than optimal weather conditions needed for the operation.
The next day, the sinking was delayed by another 30 minutes due to the entanglement of a detonation cable under the frigate. At 3:30pm, 13 November 2005 in front of a crowd of thousands the ship was scuttled and took a mere minute and 55 seconds to sink. During a storm in February 2006 the ship broke up further and is now lying in two sections on the seabed close to where it was sunk.
The depth of her keel is approximately 21 metres.
Although one of very many warships built in Britain for the Royal Navy, this particular vessel, F69, was to become an icon of Wellington and its people and was to sink itself, quite literally, into Wellington's collective consciousness. F69 served 13 years under the British Ensign. During this time Bacchante was instrumental in protecting British fishing rights in the so-called "Cod Wars". These "Wars" were a series of confrontations between the United Kingdom and Iceland over Iceland's claims of authority over tracts of ocean off their coastline as being their exclusive fishery zone. The "Wars" ended with a compromise between the two countries allowing a limited number of British trawlers access to the disputed 200 mile Icelandic exclusion zone.
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