The former steam trawler Dias (ex Viola) was built in 1906 at Beverley in East Yorkshire for the Hellyer Steam Fishing Company of Hull. Today, accompanied by the old whalers, Albatross and Petrel, she lies rusting at Grytviken, a deserted whaling station in Cumberland Bay on the remote South Atlantic island of South Georgia, a short distance from the grave of Sir Ernest Shackleton. Throughout a career which encompassed almost the entire length of the long Atlantic, this little ship remained an everyday working vessel, just one of many apparently mundane, most certainly unsung, craft used by mariners of all persuasions to earn their living in a variety of ways across the world’s wide oceans. Yet Viola’s story is unique: a remarkable story of fisheries, whaling, sealing, war and exploration during which she both weathered and witnessed many aspects of mankind’s twentieth century struggles on the sea. Viola was one of fifty or so trawlers built for the Hellyer Boxing Fleet in 1906. Later, requisitioned by the Admiralty, she was involved in the Great War at sea. By 1918 no less than twenty two of her sister vessels had been lost, to either the elements or enemy action in the Great War. Today, apart from this little ship, all physical trace of the once proud Hellyer fleet has disappeared. Viola/Dias is now the oldest surviving former steam trawler in the world with her steam engines still intact. This website is dedicated to the preservation and restoration of this unique survivor of a bygone age of steam at sea.