At eight o’clock this morning we were about 400 miles due east of Rio de Janeiro, still tracking more or less north (in fact, a touch east of north, to avoid running into the sticky-out-bit of South America at Recife), and in company with both Amazon and Brambleleaf, though the former will be fading out later in the day, heading for a rendezvous with Battleaxe before returning home via Ascension Island. Some of our officers went over to Amazon yesterday for lunch, and as a return gesture we had a bunch of her officers over for lunch today, and, of course, for a look over the ship and to watch a Sea Harrier launch.
It is getting a lot hotter now, and most people are in shirt sleeves all the time, despite the air conditioning. I went up onto the Quarterdeck at lunch-time today, and it really was rather beautiful – an almost flat calm sea, of a very deep blue; virtually no clouds and unlimited visibility, and warm, but not hot and sticky – though this stage will come soon.
Early this afternoon Amazon left us for her rendezvous with Battleaxe, and, as usual, we had a steam-past, with us maintaining station and Amazon doing all the work. She was on our port side to begin with, doing a vertrep with one of the Wessex 5 HDS aircraft that we have on board at the moment. Once that was over, she throttled right back, and as we drew ahead she turned to starboard and came up on our right hand side, accelerating hard, with her Lynx helicopter actually flying between the two ships as they closed, well below the level of our flight deck – very impressive, though it could have been a bit awkward if anything had gone wrong at the wrong moment.
So now it’s just us and the old Brambleleaf.
A bit more excitement this afternoon when we were instructed to vacate 2 deck aft of Kilo section, and to prepare for a Crash on Deck, when one of the Sea Harriers called an emergency (as I wasn’t on watch at the time I don’t know if it was a Pan or a Mayday), following a loud bang in his engine.
The obvious difficulty is that a Harrier has to recover with a good engine, otherwise he will simply not be able to hover and hence get on board. If we were on land, the aircraft could make a rolling landing down a runway, but for obvious reasons that is quite impossible on board.
In the event, the aircraft recovered safely, but it could have been quite nasty. Actually, since our involvement down south, I have got into the habit of grabbing both my wallets from the cabin if ever I think there is a chance that I won’t be able to get back to it for any reason – these wallets contain all my credit cards, bank cards, insurance certificate, driving licence, passport and so on – all the things, in fact, that would be the most difficult or inconvenient to replace if they were lost.
Night flying was scheduled for the evening, but was cancelled (it was only the Sea Harriers) after the incident this afternoon, so I had an undisturbed evening, watching ‘Silver Streak’ in the wardroom – very funny, and typical Gene Wilder. Good value.