Brian Wood – Going out on patrol

Obviously you do other exercises with ships and things like that and you act as Target Boat for ships working up down in Portland and things like that.

We were Gosport based so we’d go off and do exercises up in the North Sea with the Norwegian Navy, the Swedish Navy.

Then we’d be off down the Bay of Biscay doing exercises down there and every now and again we’d disappear for a number of weeks and go somewhere where we shouldn’t be maybe, so we did two long ones up north and we did another longish one in the Mediterranean, when the Russians were bringing out a new type of ship and we waited outside the Dardanelles for her to come out and then followed her around for a while.

I can talk about it now. A lot of it’s subject to the official secrets act, that was many years ago, but they know it’s done anyway these days.

Just finding out, getting all the photographs we took of it, all the noises that she generates and stuff, so we followed her around for quite a while.