A yacht and its crew was rescued after drifting dangerously close to the SS Richard Montgomery 'bomb ship'.

The Sheerness RNLI lifeboat crew was launched just after 11am yesterday after the UK Coastguard reported a 27 foot yacht with three people onboard was drifting dangerously close to the Montgomery, a wartime shipwreck in the Thames Estuary, near the mouth of the Medway, packed with 1,400 tonnes of explosives.

The lifeboat was on the scene at 11.09am and after checking that the people onboard the were ok, a tow was established to move the yacht to safety.

With the yacht having come from a mooring in Southend a call was made to the Southend RNLI lifeboat to take over the tow, and the yacht was passed into the care of the Southend lifeboat at 12.15pm.

Cargo ship SS Richard Montgomery was anchored in Sheerness, Kent, when it grounded and broke up in 1944.

The wreck and its cargo is monitored round the clock by port authorities and protected by a 500-metre exclusion zone.

Read more: all the latest news from Sheerness.