The peace of an Isle of Wight Sunday afternoon was shattered yesterday by the news that a huge oil tanker had potentially been hijacked off the Island's coast.

In the end SBS commandos broke the deadlock with a lightning seven-minute raid after dark yesterday evening.

Who are the elite unit who broke the stalemate on the Nave Andromeda?

We are all used to seeing these ships anchored off the Island, particularly during the Covid pandemic when the world's oil trade has slowed to a crawl.

Read more: Tanker incident that shook peaceful Isle of Wight Sunday. 

But what do we know of this ship, the Nave Andromeda, which left Lagos, on the West coast of Africa on October 9 and travelled via Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, where it docked briefly on October 15, to reach the English Channel and south coast of the isle of Wight this weekend?

The ship flies under the flag of Liberia, as so many other tankers do.

Although dwarfed by the world's biggest supertankers (some of which are more than quarter of a mile long), at 228m long (that's more than two football pitches) and 32 metres wide, the Nave is no midget.

With a gross tonnage of 42,000 tonnes and a deadweight (loaded) of 72,000 tonnes, the Nave is not light either.

She was built in 2011, so is fairly young in shipping terms.

As of this morning, she is now docked in Southampton Water.