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After leaving my nightmare ship I did a year at HMS Sultan (the marine engineering mechanics training school in Gosport). I was working as
"Buffers party". Basically I was in charge of getting the bonfire ready for the 5th November, and if I say so myself , what a damn good job
I did.
A Year later it was back to sea, this time onboard HMS Andromeda, yet another Leander class frigate, this time though with a much better ships company. It wasn't long before we were back in action. We did a stint on patrol off the former Yugoslavia, stopping and searching suspected gun runners, and we also did a tour of duty in the Persian gulf.
I felt so much better knowing that the Andromeda was fitted with Seawolf missiles (proven to be very effective during the Falklands). I would have hated to do a gulf patrol on a ship with seacat as it's main air defence. |
This is Spike Ainsworth dressed up like action man, what we were
actually doing was 3"rocket loading drills.3" rockets(a.k.a.) chaff, were
used in an attempt to lure incoming missiles off course. When a
3" rocket explodes millions of tiny pieces of tin foil float through the air, which show up on enemy radar as
a "contact", so hopefully the missile
will go for that in stead of us!
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This is Scouse Johnson, Rocky and Rab Butler. Scouse was one of the
two seaman spacialist's onboard
(one job wonders we called them). Rocky was one of the Royal marines we had with us just for the "Gulf" trip, extra air cover Rocky and his mate used to go the flightdeck with shoulder launched rockets incase of an incoming air raid. Yes things were quite desperate! Just getting into the phot is Rab Butler, Leading Sonar operator.
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Of course it wasn't all work, we had
to party occasionally. Yet another Christmas away from home. We took a break from our patrol duties in the Gulf and headed down to Mombasa for Christmas. We spent 2 weeks in Mombasa, which was nice, a bottle
of rum costing only £4
God was I ill the next morning. Scouse brought me a "wobbly coffee" which sorted me out a bit.
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This was our relief turning up so we could hand over to them. The
handover consisted of getting as
close as you could, then throwing spuds and turning the hoses on each other. I don't remember which ship relieved us, as you can see it was another Leander, but we didn't really care as long as we could get the hell outta there.It's funny how once your relieved the stokers always manage
to wind on a few extra revs, they are called "homeward bounders"
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