HMS Jersey (P295): Guarding the Channel Islands' Own Waters

HMS Jersey (P295)

The First of Her Class

HMS Jersey was built in Aberdeen and launched in 1976 by Princess Anne, the eighth Royal Navy ship to carry the name and, fittingly for a vessel named after one of the Channel Islands, the very first of the new Island-class offshore patrol vessels to be commissioned, with six sister ships following her into service. It was a nice piece of naming symmetry: a ship named for Jersey leading a class that would go on to spend much of its working life patrolling the waters around the Channel Islands and the rest of the United Kingdom's fishing grounds.

Fishery Protection Duty

HMS Jersey served with the Fishery Protection Squadron for the better part of two decades, patrolling British waters, and at times those around Gibraltar, to protect the country's fishing industry, as well as providing security for North Sea oil and gas platforms, the kind of steady, unglamorous constabulary work that rarely makes headlines but keeps a genuinely important part of the economy functioning undisturbed.

The Cherbourg Incident

HMS Jersey earned herself a moment of genuine local fame on 2 April 1993, when she captured the French trawler La Calypso in Channel Islands waters, an episode that became known as the Cherbourg incident, a sharp reminder that the fishery protection work her class was built for could occasionally turn into an actual confrontation rather than routine patrolling. For a ship named after Jersey herself, catching a French vessel fishing illegally in the very waters she was named to protect had a certain neat justice to it.

A Long Second Career in Bangladesh

HMS Jersey was decommissioned in 1993 as the Royal Navy began retiring its Island-class vessels, and was sold to Bangladesh the following year alongside all but one of her sister ships, commissioning into the Bangladesh Navy on 29 January 1994 as the training ship BNS Shaheed Ruhul Amin, named in honour of the Bangladeshi naval hero Mohammad Ruhul Amin. Based at Chittagong, she went on to serve as a training vessel for a further quarter of a century, finally decommissioning on 16 June 2020, closing out a working life that had begun protecting the waters around a small Channel Island and ended training a new generation of sailors on the other side of the world.