B.O.S.T. Portland

(This story was originally written for a non RFA/RN audience)

It is not unusual for the “ship” to be preparing for the “war” while the poor Nav. is doing his ultimate test. The “Blind Pilotage” entry into Portland harbour via the NSC. All done on radar using parallel indexes and so on. No chance of a quick peep out of the windows. This navigational test is a killer and needs many hours of preparation. Using the Portland charts, there is a large and irregular shaped sandbank/reef between the natural entrance and the FOST entrance. This is laid out as a narrow channel. The Navs job is to get from the “start point” to between the breakwaters within one minute of the stipulated time. At the same time he is doing this he is required to maintain a running commentary on what he is doing. The winding course will take the ship within yards of disaster, and so all wheel orders and engine rev. counts have to be done with regard to the ships size, her “pivoting point” and sideways movement…and with regard to the position of the radar aerial being used. Very easy to forget the 400 odd feet of ship trailing along behind the radar. It is quite nerve wracking. I failed miserably on my first attempt, but after an entire night trying to sort it out I passed the next time. Makes no difference if it is day or night…but a heck of a lot of difference to the rest of the ships company who may have been looking forward to an evening ashore. Sorry, chaps. FOST Rules!

While the Nav is doing his “thing”, the rest of the ship has been preparing itself for war. One of these preps is the destruction of your living space (cabin). According to FOST all (and I mean ALL) moveable items in your cabin have to be bundled up into a large heap in a corner and lashed down with rope. This is a megga inconvenience. Come back to your cabin for a kip and then remember that all your bedding including the mattress is part of the heap. Rats. Lie on the floor. I never really got my head around this thinking. If a shell, bomb or simple fire hits or impinges, does it really matter if everything is in a heap or not. Just another example of the Marquis de Sade at work again.

A bit like (much later) an idiot CO during the Falklands thing trying to ban smoking during an air-raid…but there we go.

So the ship is now ready for war. We are all dressed up in our blue or white boiler suits, anti-flash gear (very fetching, and all carrying our “survival kit”. Enough to fill a suitcase and be too heavy to hoist into a locker on a tourist flight to Majorca (or wherever).

1. Not knowing what we may encounter, we have to tote around:-
   A personal self contained compressed air breathing set. This gives about 20 minutes of air. Excellent. Heavy. Large bright orange bag.
2. A Gas Mask. A term hated by the military (so that is what we call it). “Personal Respirator” is the PC term. This is “fitted” to your own facial shape by RN “experts” (hah!).

3. A “Once Only” survival suit. A lightweight all enclosing “pak-a-mac” designed to delay the onset of hypothermia. But if you don’t tie the cords correctly all the air will go to your feet and so make you float upside down.

4. A Lifejacket. Standard RN issue. Tightly packed into a pouch worn around the waist. Pretty good things really….except that you can never get the damn things back into the pouch. In general usage they are worn on an almost daily basis during RASes etc. Years ago we used to just hang them around the neck uninflated (they are not auto-inflating for many reasons…another type is) until tests in a pool proved that the human lungs are insufficiently strong to inflate the jacket when in the water, so now they are worn “semi-inflated”.

5. And all sorts of other bits and bobs depending on the threat. When all this lot is hung, strapped and carried then doing any sort of work or anything requiring mobility is both tedious and difficult. This gets even worse if the ship may encounter a Nuclear, Chemical or Biological hazard. But I won’t get into that stuff.

Sorry to have to do this, but I must backtrack a bit. Front-line RFAs are built with “citadels” enclosed within (usually) the superstructure. RN and RFAs are liberally endowed with “vents” of all sizes ranging from a few square inches to many square feet. All have distinctive markings. Generally indecipherable to an RFA crew, but it all boils down to where they go and what they do. Some suck, others blow. Some that are normally shut have to be opened, and vice versa when the ship is entering a “hostile environment”…nukes and chemicals and that sort of thing. When all the vents etc. are correctly opened/shut the AFUs (Air Filtration Units) are powered up to give the citadel a positive pressure. Entrance and exit for personnel is via double air-locks. The AFUs are really noisy beasts and this only increases the tension level when they are running. A citadel test is always carried out at the end of a refit. This is when you find out which cabin(s) have had a little hole drilled somewhere so an aerial can be fed out. Naughty.

The presence of these holes is normally indicated by a whistling from the little hole. The internal pressure build up (or lack of it) is measured by a simple manometer. (A “U” shaped glass tube partly filled with a liquid, pressure from the inside forces the liquid down on the high pressure side. Not all that unusual to see the thing going backwards…must be a leakage somewhere). Eventually somebody decides “that is as good as it’s going to get”.
Then we must do pre-wetting trials. As if sucking and blowing isn’t enough it now seems as if we will have to wear incontinence pants. “Pre-wetting” is a spray system that supposedly keeps off – or washes off – “contaminants”. When we had nice green decks and the ships were reasonably new seeing this system working well was akin to watching a nice lawn being watered. But over the years and given the average sailors ability to lose all sense of reason when given a paint brush a lot of the spray heads get choked. So instead of a good spray it now looks more like the system has a prostate problem.

More money spent.