Darwin Princess

Meet the site

The Darwin Princess was a 23 m (75 ft) steel passenger ferry licensed to carry 200 people. Among other work she carried Telecom staff across the harbour to Mandorah for the Radio Australia transmitter site on the Cox Peninsula. Cyclone Tracy crossed Darwin in the early hours of 25 December 1974 with gusts estimated at over 200 km/h, destroying most of the city and killing 66 people, many of them at sea. More than 20 vessels sank or were driven ashore in and around the harbour, and several of those wrecks now form a second, much more intact wreck trail beside the 1942 sites. On Christmas Eve 1974 the ferry either put to sea or broke her moorings with only her skipper, Ray Curtain, aboard, and vanished. She remained lost until 2004, when a fisherman snagged an anchor on an obstruction near the recently found Booya. Divers from Coral Divers made the first dives and confirmed her identity from drawings, and the water police and the skipper's family were notified.

The wreck lies upside down in about 26 m. She appears to have hit the seabed on her side and slid around 10 m across the sand before settling, with the port side buried. The rudder is torn away, the propellers are wrapped in heavy rope, the bow cleat is bent down and there is a large dent in the port side, perhaps from a pylon or another vessel. The mast and handrails are gone and doors hang loose; plastic chairs and life jackets remain inside the hull, and a wide, chaotic debris field surrounds it, including a large concrete block. Visibility is often only a metre or two, and one team reported a single exploratory dive running to 2.5 hours including decompression. This is a dark, deep, entangling site that tells a hard story, and it is one for experienced wreck divers only.

What you might see

Estuary cod, golden snapper, jewfish, batfish and baitfish around the hull

Location

Darwin Harbour, close to the Booya; the ferry lies upside down in about 26 m with a large debris field.