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March 21, 2005
War service for a trawler ...
Digging through my father's effects, I came across this photograph of the ship he served his first sea-going time on as an Ordinary Seaman. She was one of a pair of steam trawlers converted to magnetic minesweeping, having served most of her already long life in the North Sea and the cod waters off Iceland. The Red Sea, Mediterranean, and the Northern Indian Ocean/Arabian Gulf must have been a real challenge for those living in her converted fish holds!
HM Minesweeping Trawler Sunburst at sea in the Indian Ocean.
The pair, incongruously named "Sunburst" and "Moonburst" were coal burners and spent a lot of their time between sweeps and patrols filling their bunkers with coal. They visited Aden, Port Said, Suez, Alexandria, Kilindini, and Adu Atoll. Steering a straight compass course was a bit tricky with the sweeps streamed, as the circuit breaker which "pulsed" the magnetic field to detonate any mine was located behind the helmsman, and everytime it "pulsed" the compass card did a violent swing through 360 degrees, alternately clockwise and anti-clockwise. As the pulses were a minute apart, this meant the card was constantly swinging!
My father spent six months in this ship before being posted for officer training and always remembered her crew - mostly original crewmembers from Hull - fondly, asserting that he had learned everything he knew about seamanship from them.
Ironically these old ships were lost sweeping off Sri Lanka in the closing days of the war.
Posted by The Gray Monk at March 21, 2005 09:30 AM