HMS Explorer (P164): Training Yorkshire's Sailors From Hull to the Baltic

Built for the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service

HMS Explorer was built in 1986 by the now-defunct Watercraft Marine, originally constructed for the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service as an Example-class tender under the designation XSV Explorer. Like her sister ships, she was a twin-screw vessel built from moulded glass-reinforced plastic, distinguishable in her early years by the black hull that marked out RNXS vessels from their Royal Navy Archer-class equivalents, a livery she carried until 2005.

HMS Explorer served eight years as an RNXS tender under the pennant number A154, before transferring to the Royal Navy proper when the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service was disbanded in 1994. She was reclassified with the new pennant number P164 and assigned to the Yorkshire Universities Royal Naval Unit, a role she has continued in ever since.

Training Hull, Sheffield and Leeds

HMS Explorer is based in Kingston-upon-Hull and primarily serves the Yorkshire Universities Royal Naval Unit, providing seagoing training for students from the universities of Hull, Sheffield and Leeds, part of the same nationwide network of small patrol and training vessels that gives undergraduates genuine hands-on experience of naval life well before any of them formally join the service. Her training deployments have typically run for up to five weeks at a stretch during the Easter and summer periods, giving students an intensive introduction to navigation, seamanship and shipboard leadership.

Reaching the Baltic

HMS Explorer's operational range expanded substantially following a significant engine upgrade in 2014, and in the summers of 2015 and 2016 she deployed to the Baltic Sea for training and local engagement work, a considerably more ambitious itinerary than the coastal patrols around Yorkshire's own waters that had defined much of her earlier career.

HMS Explorer also took on a number of notable ceremonial duties during 2016, providing transport for dignitaries, including members of the Royal Family, during commemorative events that year, and serving as guard ship for the Sunderland Air Show, a role that put her firmly in the public eye alongside her ongoing, less visible work training the next generation of naval officers.

Continuing Service

HMS Explorer remains actively assigned to the Coastal Forces Squadron's Inshore Division, continuing to combine undergraduate sea training with ceremonial duties and public engagement work, a genuinely important if quietly unglamorous role that has kept her busy for more than three decades since her transfer from the old Royal Naval Auxiliary Service, training the officers of tomorrow one training cruise at a time.