See, I was looking for a picture of a freshly inked tattoo. I knew it was there somewhere but I found a thousand other pictures first. There goes my evening. I’ll have to look at every single one of them….and so will you!

First up, Falklands tour from September 1984 to March 22, 1985. Your blogger was eighteen years old and had already been in the Navy for two years. I joined HMS Southampton, a Type 42 Destroyer  in June ’84 and was with her for a year.

Trivia note from the Wikipedia article:

In 1984, she ran over one of the Shambles Buoys off Portland during final War Games before deploying to the Falklands, sinking the buoy and resulting in repairs in dry dock.

We had just left Portsmouth and stopped in Portland for some war-gamey kind of exercises and finally set off for Gibraltar. We had just made it out of Portland when the ship lurched and there was a painful scratching sound. Then the propellers started making a horrible noise.

We had to return to dry dock to replace one propeller shaft and have the other straightened out a bit. They did a fine repair job of straightening out the shaft but not fine enough, and for the next six months, if we went above 12 knots, the noise in our mess was completely unbearable. We could barely hear each other even if we shouted. My bunk was about 4 feet above the seal where the propeller shaft entered the ship.

We headed with careful haste to Gibraltar to meet up with the rest of our squadron.

We were the lead ship of our squadron, and as we arrived in Gibraltar, the other frigates had to salute us as we came into the harbour. All three ships were in full dress with their crews lining the decks. Right after the salute, each of the frigates unfurled a ginormous banner over the side.

One said

Buoy, Oh Buoy! What a Shambles!

The other said

Congratulations! It’s a buoy!

Note to Americans: “buoy” is pronounced “boy” in normal countries (as in buoyant).

Our Captain was absolutely furious. He was also very embarrassed, and was court-martialed when we got home.

From there, we headed south!

[I’ll tell you about our Crossing the Line ceremony another day]

Our next stop was Ascension Island where we encountered the Shit Fish. They were like salt-water piranhas. We threw huge bags of gash (aka: garbage) over the side to watch them get eaten. The water would swarm and froth and the whole thing would be gone without a trace within a minute. Legend had it that if you fell off the ship, you would have a heart-attack before you hit the water.

On to the Falklands!

The Falklands really sucked. It’s hard to imagine a worse place on earth. It was cold and barren with barely a tree and there was always a gale blowing.

My family almost moved there in the late seventies as my dad worked for the company that owned most of the fisheries there.

We called the people who lived in the Falklands Bennies after Benny from Crossroads — until one day we weren’t allowed to call them Bennies any more because someone noticed it was rude. So we called them Stills (because they were still Bennies) instead. I could’ve been a Benny!

Port Stanley, the capital of The Falklands, had four pubs and they all sold the same cans of Penguin Ale. It was not uncommon to get banned from a pub in Port Stanley and, indeed, on one night I got banned from all four of them. I forget why but I imagine it was something to do with having too much Penguin Ale.

We spent Christmas Day anchored in San Carlos Water, which the military historians among you may remember as the scene of a ferocious battle during the Falklands War two years earlier. It was also the main landing site from which British forces had recaptured the Falkland Islands.

The picture above is taken on the Flight Deck after Christmas Dinner. See the clear blue skies? I think that must’ve been the only clear day the whole time we were there. The five of us (Harry, Jock, Andy and Pincher) were great friends and went everywhere together. I wonder where they are now?

And here’s us having Christmas Dinner. For some reason, I wasn’t drinking at the time but everyone else was drunk as drunk could be. The dude opposite me (don’t remember his name) had just turned sixteen — impossibly young to us eighteen-year-olds!

Here’s me with an after-dinner coffee and my Green Machine Fighting Machine t-shirt.

Wearing that very t-shirt, I played a full 90 minutes of football with six pints of beer in me, narrowly missing George Best’s record by two pints. We lost, but we drank another six pints after the game.

And here’s me sitting on my pit (aka: bunk).

The pits were stacked three high and they were all collapsible to make a kind of couch, but in practice, only the pits in the mess square, where everyone socialised, were ever collapsed.

The pits in the mess square were reserved for the most junior of junior ratings — or Artificers. Artificers (Tiffies) were engineers, and because we were destined to be promoted rapidly up to the higher ranks, we were condemned to suffer twice during our apprenticeship. Most young sailors were given a proper bunk after a couple of months, but tiffies — me and Jacko — had to spend the whole year there.

In the Mess Square, we weren’t allowed to go to bed before Pipe Down at 11 pm but even then, we would still have people sitting on our beds drinking until 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning, while we were trying to sleep. Fortunately, we couldn’t hear them over the noise of the bent propeller shaft.

After Christmas, we had a fun little trip over to South Georgia. I hope to tell you more about South Georgia another day, but for now, I’ll just mention that South Georgia may be the most beautiful place on Earth.

It wasn’t all fun and games on HMS Southampton.

As an apprentice, I had to spend a week or two in each of the engineering departments (Sea Dart, 4.5in Gun, Comms, Radar, Computer, Sonar, small arms, plus some others that I don’t remember). That was my day job. But we had additional responsibilities for Defense Stations and Action Stations, too.

During Defense Stations, half the ship’s company man the weapons systems because “we might be attacked at any moment”. We were at Defense Stations for most of the time we were in the Falklands and my Defense Station was the 30mm BMARC twin-barrelled anti-aircraft gun.

It was a pretty cushy gig. Each gun had two people (one to load and one to fire) and there was a little cabin next door where we waited, ready to man the gun. I spent most of my time in that cabin working through the A Level Maths textbook I borrowed from Jacko.

Every now and again, we would spring into action. It was usually a drill but one time it was for real when two Argentinian Jets came to give us a scare. They closed us to about a mile before they veered away and left us in peace. It’s quite thrilling to have your guns pointing at a plane with your finger on the trigger and you don’t know whether the plane will shoot first.

Every now and again, we would fire our guns at a practice target. A brave pilot would tow a target on a wire and we’d hear

“Alarm aircraft! Bearing: Red nine-zero! Elevation two-two!”

I’d rush for my gun and wait for

“Port guns, engage!”

Then I’d blast away at the target at 60 rounds per second per barrel, accompanied by two 20mm Oerlikans and the 4.5in Mk8 gun, all filling the sky with tracer.

Action Stations were for when the ship was preparing to fight. My action station was in the gunbay.

The gunbay is the magazine beneath the 4.5in gun way up in the bow of the ship. The gun fires a shell every 2.4 seconds and there is a feed ring in the gunbay below decks holding 12 rounds ready to fire. There are hundreds and hundreds of additional shells on shelves around the gun. My job was to make sure that the feed ring never got empty when the gun was firing because the gun would stop firing and we would get shouted at.

Now. Imagine, if you will, a rolling sea. Imagine a magazine full of rounds weighing 72lbs each. Imagine two 18-year-olds who each have 5 seconds to grab a 72lb shell and carry it over to the feed ring for the gun.

Did I mention that we were way up in the bow? When the ship rises and falls in a heavy sea, the forces on your legs are so strong that you can barely stand up. That 72lb shell makes it almost impossible.

Now imagine this:

“Naval Gunfire Support! 300 Rounds! Engage!”

It’s hard work to load 300 shells weighing 72lbs each! The top shelves in the magazine are so high that you stand on tip-toe to drag the shell down from the shelf and you catch it on your collarbone. Guess how much that hurt.

The rest of our tour passed without incident. Oh. Except for the Argentinian submarine that followed us around for several days before we spotted him and followed him for a week instead.

Oh. And the storm that caused the ship to roll over so far that one of the Sea Dart missiles fell over in the magazine and we all thought we were going to die.

Oh. And the Force 11 storm that battered us for a week on our way home.

Storms are pretty cool. On any given ship, about half the crew gets seasick and about half don’t. I get sick for a couple of days when I first join a ship but then I am fine and not even a storm will bother me. Both our Captain and First Lieutenant suffered from seasickness, so whenever there was heavy weather, they would send everyone to bed — unless they were required to keep the ship sailing. The half of us who didn’t get seasick sat around drinking and playing cards for a week.

I am sure I have missed some important bits – like the Master of Your Domain contest (predating Seinfeld by several years!) and the deckchair bonfire and my Two Days’ Nines (punishment) for being “thirty seconds adrift from the operations room which place it was my duty to attend” but I am tired. If I remember, I’ll tell you about them another day.