What do you know, after spending a year at HMS Collingwood I received my draft order to join the Andromeda again. When I left her, she had just gone into re-fit in Rosyth, a year to the day I was to rejoin her to bring her out of re-fit.
When I arrived in Rosyth the Andromeda was still covered in scaffolding and fresh paint, I moved into shore accommodation for the first 6 weeks until she was ready for sea. My old mate Spider Webb from the Arrow joined (as Chief ops (r)), which was brilliant because I got the job of Ops room sweeper and Spider was my boss. All credit to my other boss's in the R.N. but Spider was the best. We looked after each other pretty well and i'm very grateful to Spider for all he did for me, Cheers mate.

Another ex-Andromy was Scouse Johnson the seaman specialist, he re-joined as Buffer. A .couple of the new lads became really good mates, Smudge "the spacedog" Smith, Andy Dorricott and myself were like the three stooges, many a good run ashore together

The Andromeda turned out to be my last warship, quite sad to think all these ships have gone now, either scrapped or sold. All part of the decline of the British empire I suppose. Meanwhile the yanks and the Russians just keep building more and more.

This is me, playing with my 3"rocket (innuendo).
Seriously though, we had to practice loading drills as often as possible.
The idea was to get 8 rockets out of the locker and load them into the barrels of the rocket launcher in a specified time. We always managed to beat that time I'm very proud to say. 3" rockets are also known as 'chaff' which is basically a decoy for incoming misslies.
It was always more difficult at night when it was pouring with rain, and the ship was rolling everywhere and you were wearing anti-flash gloves (see photo). The fun we used to have.

My normal place of work was in the ops room in charge of the surface picture, during action stations you would have an on watch action station (ops room) and an off watch action station, in my case I/C of the starboard 3" rocket launcher, so hopefully it would be a nice sunny day when it was my off watch action station.