|
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. |
This is the ships boarding party
having a pactice session in the
gemini, when we did Gulf patrols we had to stop and search a lot of shipping and 9 times out of 10 the method of boarding another ship
was by gemini. Which was nice
when the weather was good, but no
fun when it got a bit hoppy. Occasionally if you were lucky you
got togo by helicopter!
|
Here's me doing my "Army" salute,
just messing about really. I was supposed to be mopping the Starboard waste down, but it looked pretty clean to me. It made a nice change to get out of the Ops room for a while, so I used to quite look forward to this kind of work. The Ops room
was O.K. but you have heard of that saying "kept in the dark and fed s**t" well I think it originated from ships
Ops rooms
|
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 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 9 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. It was always more difficult at night when it was pouring with rain, and the ship rolling everywhere. The fun we used to have.My normal place of work was in the ops room, during action stations you would have an on watch station (ops room) and an off watch station, in my case I/C of the starboard 3" rocket launcher. |
|
