A bad, black day.
I was woken at 0645 by a pipe which announced the first stage of Operation Thimblehunt – a search for a missing person – and I got up almost straight away, as I had to supervise a search of all ‘my’ compartments (which practically speaking was just the Air Office, the checking of which was a formality, as it is always kept locked when not in use), before reporting the result of the search to Commander (Air). The missing person was the Man Overboard Sentry, by a bizarre quirk, as he was the one person on the ship that could obviously never be seen as he fell, as he himself was on the Quarterdeck to spot anyone else falling, or anyone in the wake of the ship.
As soon as Thimblehunt provided no evidence of him elsewhere on the ship, we turned about, and brought the ship onto a reciprocal course, while bringing the Wessex (the ideal SAR aircraft) and the Sea Kings to readiness. The big problem was that we didn’t know exactly when he fell, as he last reported to the Bridge at 0530, and wasn’t due to report again until 0600. When he didn’t call in, an investigation was launched, but he wasn’t declared officially missing until 0615. In that forty-five minute bracket, from 0530 to 0615, the ship had travelled about fifteen miles, more or less in the centre of the second largest ocean on the surface of this planet.
We navigate primarily by satellite navigation, which means, more or less, that we radio a group of satellites and say ‘Where are we?’ The satellite determine where the radio signal came from, and simply radio back the precise position to us. It’s all done electronically, of course, but that’s the principle. Because of this high level of accuracy, we were able to tell precisely where the ship had been in that time slot, but it still gave us a track fifteen miles long to search, to which had to be added the effect of the currents and swell in the area.
The question of survival was another matter, as well. The sea temperature was about 14 C, which made the sea slightly warmer than the air, but it still only suggested a survival time of about three to four hours, conscious, and perhaps another hour or two unconscious, assuming that the body didn’t float face down, which it almost certainly would – a basic design defect of the human frame.
As time went on, a further factor became apparent – he almost certainly hadn’t fallen, but had jumped. Investigation on board revealed that the rating (who I will not name for obvious reasons) had made at least one previous suicide attempt, and had actually been talking about jumping off the ship the previous day, but had not (as so often seems to be the case) been taken seriously.
The supposition that he had jumped was considerably strengthened by the discovery of a watch on the Quarterdeck – a watch that the rating in question had borrowed earlier from one of his mess-mates. All estimates of probable survival time were based upon the premise that the person wanted to live – if he wanted to die, a completely different set of figures would be operative. What seemed to tragic about the whole thing was the fact that we had just been through a fairly difficult commission together, and were now on our way home for Christmas, with all that that implies.
The day was ideal for a search, with a flat calm sea, bright sunshine and almost no wind, and for the rest of the day, until dusk, we quartered the area with the ship, flying between three and six helicopters throughout the period, but despite all this, no trace whatever was found, and as dusk fell, the aircraft returned and the ship (which had been joined by Brambleleaf during the search – we overtook her on Friday) resumed its easterly heading, and carried out a RAS with the ‘leaf as our first evolution, as our fuel computations had (obviously) been based upon an uninterrupted passage at a reasonable speed, but after all the running about today, and the fact that we have effectively lost a day, we will have to greatly increase speed in order to meet our deadline at the other end, and hence the need for more fuel.
The Captain went on the ship’s broadcast shortly after we left the search area and summarised the events of the day (but not the high probability of suicide, which is clearly fairly confidential), and life returned to normal, but with a shadow – it was not the best end for an otherwise most successful deployment.
In complete contrast, the Sod’s Opera (Sod’s, by the way, can also be spelt Sods, as it does, according to one school of thought, stand for Sailor’s Opera and Drama Society) was a complete success, with a series of very funny and highly competent acts, spiced, if that is the word I’m looking for, by John Seal and myself making idiots of ourselves in the spaces between acts.
The Opera was preceded by the ship’s draw, offering prizes of considerable value, starting at a Ford Escort car and finishing with a £50 voucher, and which attracted a good deal of interest, predictably enough. Exactly as I had expected, I won exactly nothing, but I hadn’t bought many tickets, so I can’t really complain. All in all, a good evening, in contrast to the rest of the day.