HMS Guernsey (P297): A Fishery Protection Veteran's 8,000-Mile Final Voyage

Built Like a Trawler, for Good Reason

HMS Guernsey was built by Hall, Russell and Company in Aberdeen, laid down on 14 May 1976 and launched on 17 February 1977, an Island-class offshore patrol vessel deliberately modelled on the rugged, seaworthy lines of two specific ocean-going trawlers, FPV Jura and FPV Westra. The whole class exists because the Royal Navy borrowed Jura for evaluation between 1975 and 1977, liked what they found, and ordered seven more ships built to essentially the same design. At 59 metres long and displacing around 1,000 tonnes, HMS Guernsey was never quick, a top speed of 16 knots, but she could cover 12,500 nautical miles at a steady 11 knots without needing to stop, exactly the kind of dogged endurance the job demanded.

That was very much the point: the Island class was designed for the unglamorous, weather-beaten work of patrolling Britain's fishing grounds and offshore waters, a role that demanded genuine sea-keeping ability over speed or firepower. She commissioned into the Royal Navy on 28 October 1977.

A Quarter Century of Fishery Protection

HMS Guernsey served for around 26 years in the kind of role that rarely makes headlines but matters: patrolling British waters, enforcing the 200-mile fishing zone declared around the UK, and providing a visible Royal Navy presence around the coasts and offshore installations of the United Kingdom, work carried out year in and year out by the Island-class vessels of the Fishery Protection Squadron, later renamed the Overseas Patrol Squadron, throughout the final decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. It was not merely symbolic work either: the class collectively brought in hundreds of thousands of pounds in fines from vessels caught fishing illegally, real money for what looked, at a glance, like a fleet of unarmed trawlers going about their business.

The timing of her building was not a coincidence. Britain moved to a two-hundred-mile exclusive fishery zone with effect from 1 January 1977, six weeks before Guernsey went down the ways at Aberdeen, and at a stroke the area the Royal Navy was expected to police went from a coastal strip to an exclusive fishery zone of some three-quarters of a million square kilometres of the north-east Atlantic and the North Sea. There were not going to be frigates for that, and frigates would have been a waste of money if there had been. What the job needed was a small number of very seaworthy ships that could stay out for weeks in bad weather and cost almost nothing to run, which is why the Admiralty went and borrowed a Scottish fishery cruiser and copied her. Why the limits moved in the first place, and the quarrel with Iceland that forced the issue, is set out in the article on HMS Alderney (P278).

The yard that did the copying is worth knowing about too, and it is the reason the design works rather than merely existing. Hall, Russell of Aberdeen had been building for the fishing industry and for the Navy for over a century by 1976, and its story is set out at length in the article on HMS Anglesey (P277), another of the seven. A yard that spends a hundred years building boats for men who have to work the North Sea for a living does not need to be told what a hull ought to do in a gale.

It is worth saying what the work actually consisted of, because it is a good deal more like policing than like warfare. A boarding party goes across in a sea boat, in whatever the weather is doing, and then does paperwork on a moving deck: the skipper's licence and logbook are checked, the position at which the gear was shot is established from the vessel's own records and compared with where she says she was, the catch in the hold is sorted and measured against minimum landing sizes, and the mesh of the net itself is gauged, because a net with the mesh a few millimetres too small takes fish that should have been left to grow. Every one of those is a technical judgement made by a young officer standing in fish, and every one of them can end in a prosecution. The class between them brought in hundreds of thousands of pounds in fines, and the deterrent value of simply turning up was worth a great deal more than that.

Detailed accounts of HMS Guernsey's own individual deployments during this long stretch of service have proven difficult to trace in the sources available, which is not unusual for a patrol vessel whose career was built on steady routine rather than singular headline-grabbing incidents; what is clear is that she, and her sister ships, formed the quiet backbone of Britain's fishery protection effort for a generation.

The island she was named for has a naval history of its own, and one part of it is worth knowing. In November 1943 the bodies of twenty-one British sailors from the cruiser Charybdis and the destroyer Limbourne came ashore on Guernsey, then under German occupation. The occupying authorities permitted a funeral with military honours and forbade islanders to attend it; around five thousand of them, a quarter of the island's population, went anyway, and the Germans banned any further such ceremonies for the rest of the war. That story is told in the article on HMS Grenville (F197). It is a reasonable guess that the affiliation meant rather more in the Bailiwick than the usual civic exchange of plaques.

A New Life in Bangladesh

HMS Guernsey was paid off in 2003, and on 29 January 2004 was sold to the Bangladesh Navy alongside her sister ship HMS Lindisfarne, the last two Island-class vessels to leave Royal Navy service. The formal handover ceremony took place at Portsmouth the following day, with Bangladesh's High Commissioner to Britain, Mofazzal Karim, attending as chief guest for an occasion marked with rather more pomp than either ship's usual diet of trawler inspections.

Rather than being scrapped, she was sailed some 8,000 miles from the United Kingdom to her new home alongside Lindisfarne, herself soon to be renamed BNS Turag, calling at ports in Morocco, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Sri Lanka along the way for goodwill visits and resupply, before finally arriving at Mongla Naval Base in May 2004, an epic final voyage for a ship that had spent her entire prior career within a few hundred miles of the British coast.

That delivery voyage deserves a moment of respect, because it was a serious undertaking rather than a formality. A 59-metre ship with a top speed of sixteen knots, twenty-six years old, going from Portsmouth to the Bay of Bengal means Biscay, the length of the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, the Red Sea in summer, the Gulf of Aden and then the Indian Ocean, with a Bangladeshi crew learning the ship as they went. The stops at Morocco, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Sri Lanka were as much about fuel and fresh water as diplomacy. The whole passage took roughly three months and was, by a very wide margin, the longest single journey either ship had ever made. A vessel designed to work a few hundred miles off Aberdeen crossed half the world under her own power at the age at which most warships are being cut up.

HMS Guernsey was formally commissioned into the Bangladesh Navy on 3 October 2004 as BNS Sangu, crewed by around 100 personnel, and remains in active service to this day.

She has since taken part in a range of multinational exercises, including CARAT with the United States Navy in 2011 and 2012, and Exercise Milan at the Andaman Islands in 2008 and 2014, a notably impressive second act for a ship originally built to chase trawlers off the coast of Britain.

She has done rather well out of it, too. Five of the seven Island-class ships ended up in Bangladesh, where they are known as the Sangu class, after her; they patrol an exclusive economic zone in the Bay of Bengal that has exactly the same problems the North Sea had in 1977, namely too much water, too many boats and not enough ships to watch them. As of 2026 she is still on the active list, which makes her about forty-nine years old. A hull drawn from a trawler, built to chase trawlers, is now in her fifth decade of doing it under a different flag on the other side of the world.

The five are worth naming, because the renaming did something rather neat. The Island class took their names from British islands; the Bangladesh Navy renamed every one of them after a river in Bangladesh. Guernsey became Sangu, Lindisfarne became Turag, Alderney became Karatoa, Anglesey became Gomati and Shetland became Kapatakhaya. A class named for islands in a cold northern sea became a class named for rivers in a hot delta, and did the same job in both.

And the reason that job suddenly mattered so much in the Bay of Bengal is not a fisheries story at all. It is a legal one. For decades Bangladesh had no agreed maritime boundary with either of her neighbours, which meant that a very large area of sea was claimed by two countries at once and could not really be policed by anybody. In 2012 the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea settled the boundary with Myanmar, the first maritime delimitation the tribunal had ever made and the first time any international court had fixed a line for the seabed of an exclusive economic zone and the continental shelf beyond it at the same time. On 7 July 2014 an arbitral tribunal at The Hague settled the boundary with India.

Between the two rulings Bangladesh acquired, on paper and then in fact, a settled maritime area she had never had before, complete with fish, gas prospects and a great deal of traffic. What she did not have was the ships to look at it. She had, however, just bought five extremely seaworthy former British patrol vessels, at scrap-adjacent prices, built to police exactly this kind of problem in exactly this kind of weather.

The ITLOS judgment also produced one of the odder features in the law of the sea, a so-called grey area in which the seabed belongs to Bangladesh and the water directly above it belongs to Myanmar. Quite what a patrol vessel is supposed to do about a fishing boat in that column of water is a question for lawyers. What Sangu can do is turn up, which is the entire point of her and always has been, whether the boats she is looking at are working off Aberdeen or the mouths of the Ganges.