Brian Wood – I started to enjoy it after Part 3

Because I was sort of maybe mechanically minded, I was streamed into the right Branch I think. When I was on the Frigate, I did all the Boiler Room Watch Keeping, all the positions in the Engine Room.

The Chief Stoker saw something in me and he put me as a ‘Tanky’ which is in charge of the all the fresh water, all the fluids, oil and FFO, and I was used to finding out how systems and I was keen on finding what every valve was and how everything operated, so I found doing my Part 3 training reasonably easy, put it that way.

It wasn’t hard because I was already used to like a systems sort of person in my mind, and I wanted to know how engines worked, bang, suck, blow and all the rest of it. So, the Part 3 training is quite difficult in a way because it was long hours.

You still had to keep Watches, I was Watch Keeping in the Engine Room and the Control Room and then when you were off Watch, you start doing your Part 3 training, so it was 17 hours days when you were doing that.

And I was lucky because when we sailed, we went on what we call a ‘sneaky’ in them days so you were sailing around trying to be undetected in places where you might not should have been, and we were a 14 weeks at sea, and by the time we come back, I’d passed my Part 3.

A lot of people will take up to 4,5,6 months to do their Part 3, some even longer, but because I couldn’t do anything else, you were stuck onboard a submarine underneath the water for 14 weeks. Learn everything you could and I started to enjoy it. I thought, “Oh, this is the life for me.”