HMAS Kuttabul, formerly SS Kuttabul, was a Royal Australian Navy depot ship, converted from a Sydney Ferries Limited ferry.
Kuttabul and her identical sistership, Koompartoo, were the largest and last K-class ferries built. Kuttabul had the highest passenger carrying capacity of any ferry on Sydney Harbour and was ordered for the crowded Milsons Point to Circular Quay route.
During the Japanese midget submarine attack on Sydney Harbour on 31 May 1942, Kuttabul was sunk, with 21 naval personnel aboard.
After the outbreak of World War II, Kuttabul was requisitioned by the Royal Australian Navy on 7 November 1940, and moored at the Garden Island naval base to provide accommodation for Allied naval personnel while they awaited transfer to their ships.
On the night of 31 May/1 June 1942, three Ko-hyoteki class midget submarines of the Imperial Japanese Navy entered Sydney Harbour with the intention of attacking Allied warships. According to the official account, only one of the submarines, designated M-24, was able to fire her torpedoes, but both missed their intended target: the heavy cruiser USS Chicago. The torpedoes, fired around 00:30, continued on to Garden Island: one ran aground harmlessly, but the other hit the breakwater against which Kuttabul and the Dutch submarine K-IX were moored. An alternate conclusion, fortified by the contemporaneous log of the diver who found M-24 later on the day of the attack, was that Kuttabul had fallen to a five-inch shell from the Chicago. In either case, the explosion broke Kuttabul in two and sank her.
The attack killed 19 Royal Australian Navy and two Royal Navy sailors asleep aboard the ferry, and wounded another 10. It took several days for the bodies of the dead sailors to be recovered, with a burial ceremony held on 3 June. One of the ferry's wheelhouses was salvaged and used as a naval police guardhouse at the Garden Island naval base; the base was commissioned on 1 January 1943 as the stone frigate HMAS Kuttabul in commemoration of the ferry and the lives lost. The wheelhouse later came into the possession of the Australian War Memorial, and is on display alongside a composite submarine built from the wreckage of two of the Japanese midget submarines.
As a Letterbox Hybrid cache, you will find a logbook AND a Stamp. The stamp is not a trade item but intended to stay within the cache. Use it to stamp your own notebook, and stamp the logbook with your own personal stamp, OR alternatively, simply date and sign the logbook as you would normally do at any other geocache. Again, the stamp and logbook remain in the letterbox for the next visitor to use.