Sunday this week is being held on Monday, by which I mean that today was just another normal flying day, with work carrying on exactly as before, but tomorrow there will be no planned flying. That, at least, is the intention. As it happened, I did no actual controlling, but I was kept very busy attending to the paperwork in the Air Office. The work there seems to proceed in fits and starts: one day almost nothing to do, but next day on rushing round like the proverbial blue-arsed fly.
A thing I haven’t been mentioning recently is the programme the ship was been engaged in. We are, as I’ve said, spending most of our time sailing about in the COA at the whim of the Admiral and in response to the operational situation. We’ve been flying all the aircraft types, maintaining both regular CAP and surface searches with the Harriers, armed with live weapons as a matter of routine, using the AEW Sea Kings to provide us with the best possible radar picture of the surrounding area, the ASW helicopters to protect us from submarines, and still doing HDS sorties on a daily basis.
And we’re still doing all the other bits and pieces as well, including frequent RAS (Replenishment At Sea) serials, most often with Brambleleaf, because we run through aviation spirit at a very high rate of knots, not only for the aircraft of our embarked air group, but also for the gas turbine engines which drive the Illustrious through the waves with such power.
And of course it’s not just vessels belonging to the Royal Navy or the Royal Fleet Auxiliary which are down here bouncing around in the Southern Ocean. There are still a number of pure merchant vessels with us, technically referred to as Ships Taken Up From Trade or STUFT, which has had the unwitting side-effect of brightening up some of the multitude of signals which still flood through the Air Office on a daily – and indeed nightly – basis, with references to serials ‘STUFT with LUST’, when some of these merchant vessels are involved in evolutions carried out by ‘LUST’, or the Illustrious.
We have also been kept quite busy on exercises (like the present Casex/Chance Encounter Exercise that’s running right now) when the operational situation has permitted this. However, it is perhaps worth mentioning that almost every day we have been involved in a RAS or a Vertrep or some other form of routine evolution that I really have not thought worth mentioning in any detail.
But one day has simply blended almost seamlessly into the next, with almost nothing to determine what day of the week it is, except for the smallest of details: things like the Wardroom film or the menu for dinner.
A bit of a treat today with two good films. The afternoon ITV offering was one of the Roger Moore/James Bond films ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’ which I hadn’t seen before. A lot of the action was set in Hong Kong, and it was interesting to see some of the places I visited on the screen, like the ‘Bottoms Up’ bar in Kowloon which I visited with an engineer from the RFA Tidepool back in 1978 during the Group Six Deployment to Australia and all points antipodean. Not a great film, but undeniably entertaining.
Then in the wardroom in the evening we had ‘Buddy Buddy’ with Jack Lemon and Walter Matthau, the former playing a husband whose wife has run off with resident doctor from the ‘Clinic of Sexual Fulfilment’ (‘What the fuck’s that?’ as Mr Matthau put it), while Walter Matthau played a hitman trying to complete a contract. Quite an entertaining film.