Colin Clarke – Going on a seven month mission
Simon: Being on a 7-month mission … is it a different mindset or you just get into that rhythm you were talking about?
Yeah, well it gets broken up a lot as well because you’ve got the probably the initial going out, having a bit of refresher training, bit of Safety Training with some Safety Teams onboard. Just getting a tick in the box to say you’re still safe to operate this platform after it had been alongside for a number of months maybe, having maintenance, upgrades, whatever.
You’ll have probably had a crew change; you’ve got other people just need to get back into the rhythm of being at sea. Some will be brand new people, never been to sea before, be able to get them trained up, so part of that … if you’re talking about going on a long trip as I say out to the Far East, part of that is going to involve getting the platform almost up to speed, and the crew back to being a proper capable fighting machine again, but you’re doing most of that dive on an SSN ‘cos that’s where they’re designed to be. And that’s where it operates best.
You can go faster underwater than you can on the surface anyway, and you might get into the Mediterranean, maybe you would have an exercise with, I don’t know, the Italians or the French or something.
You might be doing something out there as part of a NATO support activity. The next thing you’ve got to go through the Suez Canal, so that’s a different sort of way of operating the platform. Get out the other side, get into the Red Sea, get deep again, plough along as fast as you can, ‘cos you need to get where you’ve got to get as quick as you can, so of course now you’re back into being dive routine again, 6 on, 6 off.
Then you might end up doing a task maybe in the Gulf, especially if you think of recent activities over the two Gulf Wars, so working again maybe in a coalition with another Task Group and some Americans.
You might have had a Port visit put in so you might pull into Bahrain for example, get some repairs done, restock on food.
Off you go again, so on a long trip, there’s a fair bit of transition from being alongside, being on the surface, most of the time is underwater, but then there’s time when you are just getting from A to B so you are on your own, or there might be times when you’re working as I say with a Task Group. You might be doing specific exercises with another Nation.
Then you’ve got your Port visits that will come in to that. If you go through somewhere like the Malacca Straits, then you’ve got to think about pirates who even attack submarines on the surface.
So you’ve got a whole set of Drills and Procedures for your own submarine’s Ship’s Company to deal with that activity, so if you were just on the surface coming up the Channel, you’re not thinking about pirates, but if you’re out that neck of the woods, you’ve got to factor that in to your Operating Procedures, so that happens as well.