HMS Alderney (P278): Born From the Cod Wars, Retired to the Bay of Bengal

A Warship Modelled on a Fisheries Boat

HMS Alderney owed her design to an unusually practical piece of naval history. The Island class she belonged to was originally developed for the Scottish Fisheries Protection Agency, based on the ocean-going trawlers FPV Jura and FPV Westra, sturdy, seaworthy vessels built for exactly the kind of grinding, weather-beaten patrol work the North Atlantic demanded. After the Royal Navy's own bruising experience during the Cod Wars with Iceland, in which lightly built frigates had struggled against Icelandic gunboats in a dispute nobody had quite planned for, the Navy decided the fisheries protection design had the right idea, and ordered seven vessels to the same pattern.

Alderney was one of them, built by Hall, Russell and Company, laid down on 11 June 1978, launched on 27 February 1979, and commissioned on 6 October 1979.

Two Decades of Unglamorous, Necessary Patrol Work

Alongside her sister ships, Alderney formed part of the backbone of the Fishery Protection Squadron, whose job was to patrol the Atlantic fishing grounds around the British Isles and safeguard the North Sea's oil and gas installations, a role with none of the drama of a destroyer's war record but a great deal of genuine, ongoing importance to Britain's economic security. It was the kind of quietly essential work that rarely produces dramatic headlines, patrol after patrol, year after year, keeping watch over waters that mattered a great deal to the country even when nobody was shooting at anyone.

A New Flag in the Bay of Bengal

Like most of her class, Alderney's Royal Navy career wound down through the 1990s as the fleet was gradually decommissioned. She was acquired by Bangladesh on 31 October 2002 and commissioned into the Bangladesh Navy on 4 May 2003 as BNS Karotoa, joining several of her sister ships in a new life patrolling entirely different waters on the other side of the world.

As Karotoa, she has continued in active service under the Commodore Commanding Bangladesh Navy Khulna, carrying a 40mm Bofors gun and modern surface search radar into a second career that has now, remarkably, outlasted her first. A ship built to a fishing boat's hull design, in response to a very British dispute with Iceland over cod, has ended up serving a South Asian navy for longer than she ever served the one that built her.