"From the High Seas"

November 26, 2003

It is 1400 Hours, Tuesday, November 25th, and as I write this I’m informed I am approximately seventy nautical miles off the coast of southern Oregon.  I am aboard Her Majesty’s Canadian Ship (HMCS) Vancouver (FFH 331), a Halifax class frigate.  She’s currently underway as part of a task group comprised of sister-frigate HMCS Regina and fleet oiler HMCS Protecteur, with HMCS Ottawa to join us enroute. 

We have twelve of these superb “fighting frigates”, five here in the west and seven stationed on the east coast, and arguably the best in the world at what they do.  Whether it’s protecting a task force from any potential threat…surface, air, or undersea; intercepting and boarding suspicious vessels of interest while they’re underway on the high seas; or sovereignty enforcement off Canada’s thousands of miles of coastline…the men and women on board our nation’s frigates are up to the task. 

It is day two of a nine day exercise that will take me from Victoria, B.C. to San Diego, California.  According to the itinerary the Navy has planned for me, during that time I will become “somewhat” familiar with what makes the Vancouver tick.  I say “somewhat” because as Commander Bill Riggs, Vancouver’s Captain explained to me upon my arrival, these ships are so complex that virtually no one individual can possibly know everything there is to know about them.  

We had barely cleared Esquimalt Harbour and retrieved our RHIB (Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat), that operation itself requiring a tricky bit of seamanship to hoist it aboard while underway at 10 knots, when the Captain made the decision to immediately shake the cobwebs from ship and crew alike to ensure everything was ship-shape. 

Despite the light chop, it only took 90 seconds for the Vancouver to reach her maximum speed of thirty knots.  The Captain then ordered full astern and brought the ship to a standstill in one and a half ship lengths!  Minutes later we were again traveling at fifteen knots…in reverse!  A couple of high speed turns which heeled the ship over at about 25 degrees completed this first demonstration…talk about “shock and awe”…I was certainly suitably impressed and I’d been aboard less than an hour! 

A man overboard drill and a RAS (Replenishment at Sea) exercise rounded out “day one”.  The man overboard drill involved the unceremonious dumping of a dummy over the side…no, it wasn’t the politician, a smoke marker was immediately jettisoned, the ship then reversed course and launched a two-man Zodiac boat to pick up the wayward “crew member”.  Well executed, this drill takes about six minutes from the time “man overboard” is hollered, to the time he is plucked from the briny! 

The RAS procedure is not only one of the most impressive to view but potentially one of the most difficult and dangerous.  It involves having one or two of the faster, fighting ships overtake the AOR (Auxiliary Oiler Replenishment) ship and then exactly matching her course and speed while a large hose is fed across the intervening gap to refuel the smaller ship(s).  The sight of the Protecteur steaming along at fifteen knots in a rough sea flanked by the two frigates, with a mere forty yards separating the ships was truly awe-inspiring. 

It seems I’ll have to continue this next week as I’m already out of space and I haven’t even got to my stories about trying to shower while the ship pitches back and forth, up and down in 18-20 foot swells!  Or even something as simple as making one’s way down the passageway, but staggering along, like…well, like a drunken sailor, I suppose!