Portsmouth man buys 50-metre deep shipwreck sunk by German submarine in WWI on Facebook Marketplace

But now the diver has bought a shipwreck from World War One on Facebook Marketplace for £300 because he "fancied" it.

Dom Robinson, 53, first found a passion for exploring shipwrecks as a child and has been diving for over 40 years.

Dom has contributed to the discovery of many lost ships, including three Royal Navy ships.

He recovers the wreckages by investigating anomalies found by scanning the sea beds around the UK.

He said: "I’ve identified maybe 20 or 25 shipwrecks in the last couple of years. It’s really nice because each shipwreck has got a story associated with it. That’s something I find particularly rewarding.”

As he explains in the video above, Dom came across an advert on Facebook marketplace in January 2025 for the shipwreck, the SS Almond Branch, and decided to go for it.

After Dom bought the SS Almond Branch, he received a letter from a government official known as the Receiver of Wreck, who is responsible for managing who owns shipwrecks.

The letter officially stated Dom as the legal owner of the SS Almond Branch. However, most of the valuable materials that he would have been able to sell are now gone.

Dom, a project manager said: “Even though I own the shipwreck, there's nothing to stop anybody diving it. The government stopped selling shipwrecks 20 odd years ago, but I always quite fancied owning one. I was like ‘bingo, this is my opportunity to own a shipwreck!’"

Dom says every shipwreck has an official owner - whether it is privately or government owned.

In the UK, a large number of shipwrecks are privately owned, after the government sold a number of them to be salvaged after the end of World War Two.

Many people bought shipwrecks as they believed they could recover valuable materials or artefacts.

Dom's ship was a steam-powered cargo ship which sank on November 27 1917.

It was sunk by a German submarine off the coast of Cornwall, and has remained there ever since. The ship would have travelled all over the world, and there are records of it crashing into a bridge in Portland, Oregon.

Dom said: “It’s a relatively well-known wreck in the local area so I’ve dived it before, so I knew what I was getting when I bought it. This one is said to have general cargo, which means that they put all sorts of bits and pieces in it. There’s a gun mount, but the gun isn’t there, so I’d love to know what happened to that."

While exploring, he also encountered schools of fish and plant life that have now taken over the wreckage.

Dom said: “This is 50 odd meters deep, and there are significant dangers associated with going that deep. You have to come up very slowly. If you were to come up immediately you would almost certainly get decompression illness, which is where the bubbles of gas in your bloodstream can get lodged in your brain and other parts of your body."

Despite the risks associated with the dive, he said that the rewards made the expedition worth it.

Have you got a video you want to share with our readers? You can now send it to us online via YourWorld at https://www.yourworld.net/submit/ It's free to use and, once checked, your footage will appear on our website.