The Royal Navy and US Navy practised clearing a corridor through a simulated ‘mine danger zone’ in the Gulf.
According to the Royal Navy, doing the clearing on this occasion was the USS Gladiator and USS Dextrous plus HMS Shoreham and HMS Brocklesby.
According to a Royal Navy news release here:
“Minehunting is slow and painstaking, the ships themselves are agile but not fast. For protection, they were given HMS Argyll and HMS Montrose, which can call upon a panoply of weaponry to fend off foes above, on and below the water. The exercise began with the minehunters working together to clear a corridor through a (mock) mine danger zone.
HMS Shoreham alone investigated 40 ‘suspicious’ objects with her Seafox Mine Disposal System – a robot submersible which feeds back live imagery to the operations room and can also be used to safely detonate a mine; alternatively, the ships can send their dive teams down to place charges and neutralise the explosives – which Shoreham did on three occasions.”
The Royal Navy also say that with the region responsible for one sixth of the world’s oil and one third of its liquid natural gas and the waters blighted by mines as recently as the second Gulf War in 2003, the two navies train regularly to ensure that should these waters be sown again, they can be cleared in short order.
A boring and tedious job but vital.
I’ll put my hand up, Panoply was a new one for me, every day’s a school day and all that….
Good to see a predominantly UK TG for a change instead of a UK unit being tacked on the end of a larger US group.
There’s always a sense of pride when the US trusts the Royal Navy as the sole escort of its mind hunters on patrol.
*mine
ETH-mind/mine-I tod a lady on a wasup recently that she was very licky when I meant to say very luckY!! 🙂
..and I told her
“Mind hunters”. Hmm. There’s a sci fi novel in that somewhere!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindhunter:_Inside_the_FBI%27s_Elite_Serial_Crime_Unit
This was a few weeks ago. I have seen been working on some of the units since then doing maintenance.
My launch was one of (or possibly) the first minehunters and one of the smallest ever commissioned named RN warships & responsible for clearing the River Clyde from 1941 to 1944. Taken up as Echo Sounding Boat HMS Amy 2! Still going strong at 98.
But of topic but I see the FREMM design has been select by the USN for the FFG(X).
Morning, that is correct, funnily enough the CGI renders of the winning design look more like the Navantia F100 to me more than the FREMM.