Why do Frigates need tugs?

[oldharry]

I guess the Brittany ferries get more practice and can be delayed etc while frigates have to be berthed to some form of timetable .

The ferries don't always get it right. Back in 2002 a P&O ferry lost it and did rather a lot of damage to a brand new Navy boat. Some red faces there I guess! I read later that QHM insists now on tug support for ferries over a certain windspeed. BBC NEWS | England | Navy frigate damaged in ferry collision.

 

[Kukri]

佢唔可以再承受任何佢會吹嘅隊長
is Traditional

佢唔可以再承受任何渠会吹慨队长
is Simplified

No, Kukri isn’t anywhere near able to venture a pronunciation - the only Englishmen he knew who were properly fluent in Cantonese were born in HK, or policemen, or both, or in one case a Foreign Office staff member.*

(*At least he said he was in the F.O., and he was the most pukka of pukka sahibs. But he was living with a family over a butcher’s shop in Mong Kok to perfect his Cantonese, having already done something similar for his Putonghua in Taiwan and I suspect he was a spook).

Kukri can offer a rendering in China Coast Pidgin, as spoken fluently by Commander Walker in Ransome’s “Secret Water”:

“Aieeeyah! What for you do this, Captain? Never before this fashion! Engine belong break plenty soon!”

 

[jamie N]

I can recall a very brief aquaint with V S propulsion a zillionyears ago when HMS Challenger was being built for its short lived naval service. However my career took me in a different direction.....or dimension!

HMS Challenger: not the admiralty's finest hour. A chum of mine was a consultant from the diving industry, during the building of the vessel, and flattened his forehead, banging it against numerous objects in frustration, with the gap between the RN idea of best practices, safety and efficiency concerning diving on modern DP, saturation diving vessels, and his own as an up to date professional.

 

[capnsensible]

HMS Challenger: not the admiralty's finest hour. A chum of mine was a consultant from the diving industry, during the building of the vessel, and flattened his forehead, banging it against numerous objects in frustration, with the gap between the RN idea of best practices, safety and efficiency concerning diving on modern DP, saturation diving vessels, and his own as an up to date professional.

The vessel history is interesting.....for me! Still going.

HMS Challenger (K07) - Wikipedia

 

[capnsensible]

佢唔可以再承受任何佢會吹嘅隊長
is Traditional

佢唔可以再承受任何渠会吹慨队长
is Simplified

No, Kukri isn’t anywhere near able to venture a pronunciation - the only Englishmen he knew who were properly fluent in Cantonese were born in HK, or policemen, or both, or in one case a Foreign Office staff member.*

At least he said he was in the F.O., and he was the most pukka of pukka sahibs. But he was living with a family over a butcher’s shop in Mong Kok to perfect his Cantonese, having already done something similar for his Putonghua in Taiwan and I suspect he was a spook.

Kukri can offer a rendering in China Coast Pidgin, as spoken fluently by Commander Walker in Ransome’s “Secret Water”:

“Aieeeyah! What for you do this, Captain? Never before this fashion! Engine belong break plenty soon!”

A few years ago I got to teach a chap in preparation for his offshore exam. He went to Hong Kong many tides ago as a young policeman in a temporary billet. He ended up staying 30 years! Reached a fairly senior rank. When the place reverted touching he was asked to stay in the pay of the PRC. he has some awesome tales to tell. Including how his son joined the Submarine Service and was required to be positively vetted with a father in the employ of the PRC. his active service stuff I won't repeat....
We are still in occasional contact and he is a chap I admire greatly. Especially when we went out to Chinese restaurants.

 

[Hermit]

Navy and commercial are two different things. Commercial ships are staffed by professional seafarers to carry out productive work at a competitive cost. Navy focuses on pretending to fight other friendly navy ships, and are staffed by posh boys. They are very good at this. But they need competent professional commercial grown up seafarers in tugs about to help them get their pretend fight ships through difficult situations like ports filled with tricky shallow bits and other humans in boats who have no interest in pretend fighting, and alongside really hard immovable quays. It has been proven time and time again that ports are too difficult for posh boys to transit alone, as pranging pretend fight ships is embarrassing, and in extreme cases it can even result in the posh boys having to give their golden hats back.

This poor posh boy attempted to drive his own pretend fight ship ship near other ships, and look what happened:

learning-the-lessons-the-loss-the-norwegian-frigate-helge-ingstad

These American pretend fight ships were let out at night without adult supervision, and look what happened to them:

USS_John_S._McCain_and_Alnic_MC_collision

USS_Fitzgerald_and_MV_ACX_Crystal_collision

And this posh boy decided to take his pretend fight ship near land, again without suitable supervision:

navy-submarine-aground-errors-inquiry

Really, the price of a half dozen tugs around them anytime they are near any real world dangers is a small price to pay to let them keep their golden hats.

I suppose it’s all horses for courses. I am sure you are great at parking a big block of flats but how are you at ‘pretending’ to deal with real hostile submarines or aircraft (or even pirates - seem to remember that the merchant marine called for help there pretty quickly!)?

All of which I have had to do as well as the other job of driving a ship.

 

[jamie N]

I suppose it’s all horses for courses. I am sure you are great at parking a big block of flats but how are you at ‘pretending’ to deal with real hostile submarines or aircraft (or even pirates - seem to remember that the merchant marine called for help there pretty quickly!)?

All of which I have had to do as well as the other job of driving a ship.

Quite right! Absolutely nothing to do with the commercial chappies having no weapons or authority to carry arms, and it not being their job either!
Quite right......

 

[Hermit]

But many do now have paid armed guards?

 

[Kukri]

I can bore for Britain on this and I have probably done so before. I’ve only been involved in calling for help in a general way from the grey funnel line twice; once during the “tanker war” in the AG in the 1980s and once with the Somali pirates starting in 2010.

In both cases the help when it did arrive was excellent but in both cases it took about two years for it to arrive in an effective form. That wasn’t really the Navy’s fault. In both cases what was needed were convoys and these were very slow in coming.

Incidentally it is settled law (“CNCo vs Attorney General”, 1930) that the British Government is under no obligation to assist or protect merchant ships flying its flag.

 

[newtothis]

I can bore for Britain on this and I have probably done so before. I’ve only been involved in calling for help in a general way from the grey funnel line twice; once during the “tanker war” in the AG in the 1980s and once with the Somali pirates starting in 2010.

In both cases the help when it did arrive was excellent but in both cases it took about two years for it to arrive in an effective form. That wasn’t really the Navy’s fault. In both cases what was needed were convoys and these were very slow in coming.

Incidentally it is settled law (“CNCo vs Attorney General”, 1930) that the British Government is under no obligation to assist or protect merchant ships flying its flag.

Were you working with Freddy?
I heard (before my time) that the Grey Funnel Line used to hide behind the tankers, on the basis that their double hulls were less penetrable than the the warships when the missiles came in.

 

[Kukri]

I was working for CNCo. Once the convoy system was in operation, which I want to say was 1988, it worked well. Having only one, latterly two, VLCCs in the fleet, and being a low profile company that nobody had heard of, (*) we applied our minds to how to get right astern of the frigate, rather than be tail end charlie in the convoy, and, being a company known for good feeding, we decided that the trick was to offer the best lunch to the senior officers of the frigate, as they used to like to drop in by Wasp, and the warship was of course closed up at action stations, with the galleys out and everyone on sandwiches.

This worked well, the RN types complimented us on the fact that our decks didn’t “crunch”under their feet and we gave them a four course meal and sent them off with a couple of kilos of prawns on each occasion.

Years later at a Clarksons lunch I ran into the chap who had been running the BT fleet of three ULCCs. They had been doing exactly the same thing.

I’ve had four ships pirated; two container ships and the same tanker by the Indonesians, who were highly professional and were generally said to be the Indonesian Navy, “moonlighting”, and one Panamax bulker by the Somalis, which went on for ever so much longer, and lacked the relatively funny side of the Indonesian cases. Not that they were funny for the people on board at the time, of course.

It is sometimes said that the really ghastly collision in the Singapore Straits between the Teekay tanker “Nagasaki Spirit” and the OOCL container ship “Ocean Blessing”, in 1992, may have been caused by pirates taking over the wheelhouse of one of the ships. No survivors, so we will never know.

(*) Incorporated in London in 1872. Currently the largest British owned shipowning company by a country mile, and the Chairman won’t be happy that I said that.