POISED on the scaly mudbanks of Heswall foreshore in what is legally the River Dee, there is a ship. She’s not the only ship out here – but she’s the only one who was at the vanguard of the largest seaborne invasion in history.
Sarinda is a white elephant, in every sense of the word. Rare, beautiful, costly, burdensome. To reach her you must meander through Heswall boat yard, beyond the tractors and nets and the pervasive, intoxicating whiff of salt.
You have to stamp down the brush, cross wooden planks wedged over tiny streams and hold your footing over greased, muddy ground which flakes like snakeskin. The water comes in and out in strange and uneven tides, making this like a kind of dry dock.
Then, at last: fixed down by ropes that flare out in all directions, hovering awkwardly in a puddle of water, the porcelain-white deck of Sarinda. An old boat with a new coat and garters.
And pulling me up onto the freshly-restored stern are Gemma and Simon Robins - the delightful, relaxed, inspired couple from Wrexham behind her renaissance.
'We don't need a 72-foot rotting boat. That's not what we need in our life!'
Sarinda was one of about 7,000 vessels involved in the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944: D-Day. She was a navigation leader, ploughing through the channel waves to mark safe passage for the landing craft and warships at Gold Beach.
Bearing the decidedly less catchy name Motor Launch 1392, she even captured a German midget submarine in the last weeks of the war in Europe. In the 1970s, she was refurbished into a luxury motor yacht and rechristened with the evocative name she bears today. Then she landed on the scrapheap.
In January 2021, Simon – a self-confessed petrolhead who was running a campervan renovation business with wife Gemma – discovered the dejected husk while scrolling eBay. Sarinda had been rescued from certain extinction by Heswall boat yard manager Steve Ashton, and was one of dozens of boats withering away across the foreshore.
Simon was enchanted by the discovery and immediately suggested it to Gemma as their next project.
The 46-year-old has a history of taking on bizarre challenges: in 2014, he won the Guinness World Record for the world’s fastest motorhome, after he put a modified Fiat Coupe engine into a 2007 Fiat Doblo and managed to hit an astonishing 141.3mph with it. This record has never been broken – although I don’t know if anyone has tried.
But Gemma, 40, gave him short shrift at first. “I said, we don’t need a 72-foot rotting boat,” she laughs. “That’s not what we need in our lives right now!”
After doing some research, she quickly “fell in love” with the history and relented. For around £6,000, they took the ailing ship off Steve's hands and a piece of wartime history was theirs.
The pair decided to film the ship's rebirth from the start, mainly to share with family and friends. But their YouTube page, Ship Happens, unexpectedly “exploded” in popularity as history buffs and boat-hawks alike became drawn to the project and the plucky pair behind it.
Looking in the comments, there was more than a scoop of schadenfreude in the online fascination. Many tuned in to the weekly episodes expecting, even hoping, the whole project would sink like a lead balloon – or a rotten WWII boat.
But five years and a lot of blood, sweat and grease later, Sarinda has kept afloat – and the Robins’ have accidentally become a social media phenomenon.
With the help of Patreon supporters and YouTube ad revenue, they gradually wound down their campervan business and decided to go full time in the niche market of ship-repair influencers.
This surprises no one more than Gemma and Simon, who admit to having “no idea’” it would be possible to build a fanbase of paying subscribers. The responsibility still feels “bizarre” – but it’s something they take very seriously.
Fans come from all over the world to explore Sarinda, whose hull still has many of the boards and bolts from its historic voyage. Last week, two different families visited from Australia. Wannabee deckhands have even shlepped over from America offering to help rebuild her.
What kind of folk are most attracted – historians or mariners? “Both,” Gemma says. “And then people who aren’t interested in either, but they just like the project, the husband and wife working together on a big project.”
“Husband and wife actually getting on!” adds Simon.
It was a family affair from the start; the Robins children, Mason, 18 and Emilia, 15, spent a significant portion of their childhood mucking in on the boat. But that ship has—pardon me.
“Yeah, the kids have lost interest,” Simon admits. “When they were young, we used to drag them along. They’re not assed anymore, unfortunately.” I offer that people often come back to their formative experience when they’re finished with the awkward bits of growing up. But a depleted workforce hasn’t exactly slowed them down.
'It may not come across - we are actually very skilled'
This has been the first year of “big visual outside changes”, Gemma says as she takes me below deck to see where the real work started, and where they have spent the best part of the last five years.
It’s strange to suddenly find yourself stood in the cabins where a dozen soldiers would’ve slept on D-Day. Gemma points out where it all would’ve been - single cabin, double cabin, bunk beds. The shower and the toilet.
As Motor Launch 1392 was a navigator, she wouldn’t have been unloading soldiers onto Gold Beach, but she had an equally daunting task: clearing the way for any potential Nazi sea mines.
A lot of the wood is still original, but you can see how much work they have done to replace the rotten boards. “If you’d have come in last year, this was all just rot,” Gemma says.
“Now we’ve finished it, we were able to add the new deck, the new roof, the new transom.”
But these cosmetic touches belie thousands of hard, intense hours the Robins' have spent building from within. Only now does the outside world get to see what a beauty is Sarinda, framed by perfect blue skies.
I’m keen to find out if there were any challenges they came across which seemed insurmountable. How close have they come to quitting?
“We are actually, like – we may not come across like it – we are very skilled,” Simon laughs. “But we have done some things which could’ve gone t*ts up, big style.”
Last week, for instance, they removed and repaired the roof. A few weeks before that, they sawed off the aft deck (the rear of the boat) and had to refurbish and reattach it within a one-week window – before the tide came back up and flooded the boat.
There have been terrestrial obstacles to overcome, not least dealing with social media abuse – including one online forum populated by old boaters dedicated to criticising them.
And then there was the council’s installation of an electronically-operated yellow gate on Banks Road, near the shipyard.
As of July 2, the gates are restricted access only - causing consternation with residents and boat owners, who claim they were promised key fobs.
Simon and Gemma require access to get trucks across to remove waste. But even with the written support of government-funded organisation National Historic Ships, they have received a rebuke from the council – who say the gate is in place to prevent further dumping of ships on the foreshore.
“I feel let down, I feel like no one understands the impact,” Gemma says. “No one is looking at it with common sense.”
Simon agrees, and finds the explanation spurious. “It’s not like boats can’t come in by water, is it? Breaking news: boats float.”
On the other hand, if they were easily dissuaded they wouldn’t have got this far in the first place. The self-described “problem-solvers” are confident they will find a way to make it work.
As for the online abuse? The negativity is all rather shallow, while the positivity is deep and sincere. I’m struck by this comment on a Ship Happens video published in June: “Five years of my life watching this and every moment an absolute pleasure. You two are an inspiration as to what ordinary people can achieve with determination and commitment.”
'If this was a plane from World War II, it would be in a museum'
Though the Robins’ admit they were never really history buffs, the project has got them thinking about the importance of heritage and the marks we leave on this earth.
“Without people saving these historic boats, there’s none left,” says Gemma. “There was 464 of these built and worldwide, there’s like five left—no, four actually. One just got scrapped in New Zealand. If it was a plane from World War II, it would be in a museum, wouldn’t it?”
True – but equally, they have no intention of dropping £200,000 on restoring a boat just to chuck it in an exhibition to be gawked at. Simon wants to sail. “We want this boat out of here,” he tells me. “We want to use the boat and travel the world.”
And from teaming up with charities to running private charters, there are plenty of ways she could “earn her keep”, Gemma adds.
In 2029, the 85th anniversary of D-Day, the couple want to make the voyage to Normandy, tracing the same course Sarinda took on that momentous day.
Her sister ship, the Medusa, is based in Portsmouth and remains in her original wartime configuration, guns and all (owner Alan Watson has been something of a long-distance mentor for the Robins family). Someone has floated the idea of going in convoy.
And I have no doubt they will make that voyage. The Robins’ dedication is entirely proportionate to the historic heft of this vessel.
What they have pulled off so far, and continue to chip away at every day, puts paid to the idea that people are only motivated by greed, status or money.
They are motivated by love, creativity, history - and a maelstrom of other purely random, unnameable impulses. They are amateurs perhaps, but with the spirit and drive of soldiers. Thanks to them, Sarinda is inevitable.
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