HMS Hecla (A133): The Survey Ship That Became a Falklands Ambulance

Lead Ship of Her Class

HMS Hecla was laid down at Yarrow Shipbuilders' Blythswood yard in Glasgow on 6 May 1964, launched on 21 December that year and commissioned on 9 September 1965, the lead ship of the Hecla-class ocean survey vessels, a class that also included her sister ships HMS Hecate and HMS Hydra. She measured 260 feet 2 inches in length and displaced 2,733 long tons at full load, powered by a diesel-electric propulsion system giving her a top speed of 14 knots and a genuinely impressive range of 20,000 nautical miles at a more economical 9 knots, with a complement of 127 officers and ratings, all built around her core purpose of hydrographic and oceanographic survey work across the world's oceans.

Thirty Years of Charting the World's Oceans

HMS Hecla spent the bulk of her long career engaged in exactly the kind of patient, unglamorous but genuinely essential work her design was built for, surveying coastlines and ocean depths to keep Admiralty charts accurate for the Royal Navy and merchant shipping alike, unglamorous duty that nonetheless mattered enormously to the safe navigation of vessels around the globe.

An Ambulance Ship in the Falklands

HMS Hecla's steady survey career took a genuinely unexpected turn during the 1982 Falklands War, when she was reassigned to serve as an ambulance ship, ferrying wounded servicemen from the fighting out to the hospital ship SS Uganda for treatment. It was a role about as far removed from her usual survey work as could be imagined, but one that made good practical sense: a well found, seaworthy vessel with a capable crew, suddenly repurposed for one of the most important and time-critical jobs of the entire campaign, getting injured men the medical care they urgently needed.

A New Name in Ireland

HMS Hecla was finally replaced by the more modern HMS Scott in 1997, after some thirty years of service, and was subsequently sold into private hands, renamed Bligh after Vice Admiral William Bligh, the Royal Navy officer of Mutiny on the Bounty fame who was himself a noted hydrographic surveyor in his own right, a genuinely fitting choice of name for a former survey ship. Under her new name, she went on to support hydrographic surveys of Irish waters, operating out of Waterford, a quiet continuation of the very same kind of charting work she had carried out for the Royal Navy for three decades.