Everyone at Exmouth Marina knew there was an unexploded German bomb in the water. Old hands at the dock had been saying so since the end of the second world war. But the marina had been dredged and re-dredged and nothing had ever come up. It had started to sound like an old wives’ tale. The marina is a busy stretch of water: a commercial port until the late 1990s that had since been converted into a home to private yachts. A bomb, you’d think, would have a hard time staying hidden. But in the middle of the afternoon on Wednesday 14 January 2026, 81 years after the end of the second world war, Steve Hockings-Thompson, the manager of Exmouth Marina, got a call from the crew of a dredging vessel telling him he’d better come out to the boat. “I thought: ‘Oh crikey. We’ve got a bit of an issue here,’” Hockings-Thompson told me recently.