HMS Exploit (P167): From a Fire Off Lundy Island to NATO Exercises in the Baltic

Built at Woolston

HMS Exploit was built by Vosper Thornycroft at Woolston in Hampshire and commissioned in 1988, an Archer-class patrol vessel, part of the same P2000 family of small training and patrol boats as her many sister ships. Like several of her class, she was originally ordered for the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service, distinguished at the time by a black hull, before entering full Royal Navy service as part of the Coastal Forces Squadron, a role combining coastal patrol duties with the essential business of training the next generation of naval officers.

HMS Exploit has served the University of Birmingham's Royal Naval Unit, giving undergraduates hands-on experience of navigation, seamanship and leadership at sea, the same essential purpose shared across the whole small fleet of Archer-class vessels dotted around Britain's university towns and coastal training bases.

A Fire in the Bristol Channel

HMS Exploit's service was not without genuine drama. On 19 March 1994, while transiting from Greenock to Portsmouth roughly 30 miles off Lundy Island, she suffered a severe fire in her machinery space, the result of a major mechanical failure in her starboard main engine that left a large hole torn in the sump casing. Emergency services were alerted and stood ready to respond, though in the end their assistance was not required, the crew having brought the situation under control themselves, a genuinely tense episode for a small vessel operating well out into the Bristol Channel at the time.

Into NATO Waters

HMS Exploit's role expanded well beyond routine coastal training duties in more recent years. In June 2017, she deployed to the Baltic alongside several sister ships to take part in NATO's BALTOPS exercise, marking the first time Royal Navy P2000 patrol vessels had ever been involved in an exercise of that scale, a genuinely significant milestone for a class of ship more usually associated with training cruises around the British coast than major multinational NATO deployments.

In early 2024, HMS Exploit and three further sister vessels deployed to northern Norway to take part in NATO's Exercise Steadfast Defender, one of the alliance's largest military exercises in decades, held amid heightened tensions following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a striking demonstration of just how far the role of these small training vessels had expanded from their original, more modest coastal patrol origins.

Continuing Service

HMS Exploit remains based at HMNB Portsmouth, continuing to serve the Coastal Forces Squadron with a small permanent crew supplemented by naval training personnel, carrying on the dual role that has defined her entire career: training the officers of tomorrow while remaining ready, when called upon, to take her place alongside the Royal Navy's larger warships in genuinely significant international exercises.