大象传媒

From the Indian Ocean to England in HMS Nigella, Flower class Corvette K19

Transcribed from a video recording

We鈥檙e getting to the end now, aren鈥檛 we! We went back to Ceylon, to Sri Lanka, then, to Columbo, and sent back on the way home, back through the Suez Canal, to Gibraltar.
We were instructed to pick up an armed trawler and take her in tow, back to the UK. Now that was OK in calm weather, but going out from Gibraltar into the Atlantic, the weather鈥檚 a bit sort of..... bit tricky, and tricky it was, because only another force ten, that鈥檚 all, so we get round the corner, and we鈥檙e still towing this thing, about five knots, great long towrope, huge manila towrope, with a wire on it, and the tow broke, at night of course, had to break at night. We managed after all the hoo-ha to pick up the end and reconnected, and it was getting a bit ten plus, the skipper decided that we better aim for the nearest port, and the nearest port was Vigo, in Spain, on our starboard hand. Now if we鈥檇 gone to Vigo in Spain we would have been interned, so instead of that he did a slight veer to starboard to a sardine canning port called Lucios which was in Portugal. So we managed to struggle after a lot of whats-its-name in there, and we managed to get alongside, nice place, real old fashioned Portuguese town, not like you see today, I don鈥檛 know what its like today, but they canned sardines, their business, you know. We were only there for a couple of days, and we left the trawler there, and back to the UK.

Gordon Richmond

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