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After leaving the Berwick (about 5 feet astern) The whole ships company moved over to the Lowestoft, which was exactly the same type of ship, we even moved into the same bunks. So apart from a different name we hardly knew we were on a another ship.
It wasn't long before I was involved in my first war (well sort of). Iceland had been complaining that Britain were nicking all their fish, so they decided to put a "no fishing" limit around their coast, I think it was out to 60 miles. If any foreign fishing boats were caught trawling inside the limit, they would have their nets cut by the Icelandic gun boats. |
The Icelandic gunboat "Aegir" passing close astern, she was on her way to cut the nets of the Trawler on the right. (picture taken through a scuttle, or port hole to non-seagoers) |
| The gunboats used to "ram" the Royal Navy frigates and cause quite a bit of damage. To stop this happening to us we would put lenghts of 4"x4" wood out around the ship, on the end we put large baked been tins painted red with "danger explosives" written on them. Not very high tech, but it worked as we never got rammed. |
All good things come to an end, Lowestoft used as target practice for
weapon evaluation purposes |
| This time I got my draft to a place I'd never heard of before, in fact nobody onboard had heard of it. On the draft order it said "IRMO" Raasay range party, so I went to see the Navigators yeoman Simmo, who dusted of a couple of old charts and found that Raasay was an Island in between the Isle of Skye and the main land. I was being drafted up to Scotland to do range safety for torpedo firing trials. As it happened it was a really good draft |
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