HMS Orkney (P299): Cleaning Up Oil Spills and Recovering the Dead From a Sunken Freighter

Built in Aberdeen

HMS Orkney was built by Hall, Russell and Company in Aberdeen, launched on 29 June 1976 and commissioned in February 1977, an Island-class patrol vessel modelled closely on ocean-going commercial fishery protection vessels, built for the steady, unglamorous work of guarding British fishing grounds and offshore oil and gas platforms rather than for conventional naval combat.

Guarding Fisheries From Scotland to Gibraltar

HMS Orkney served as part of the Fishery Protection Squadron, patrolling waters around the United Kingdom and as far afield as Gibraltar, a notably varied beat for a vessel whose core mission remained consistent throughout: protecting British fishing interests and the growing offshore energy infrastructure that had become increasingly important to the national economy through the 1970s and 1980s. Just months after commissioning, in June 1977, she made passage north to Scapa Flow itself, following a great many far larger Royal Navy ships into one of the service's most storied anchorages.

Cleaning Up the Christos Bitas

HMS Orkney coordinated the cleanup effort after the tanker Christos Bitas ran aground on rocks some ten miles off Milford Haven on 12 October 1978, a significant environmental incident that spilled around 22,000 barrels of heavy Iranian crude into the Irish Sea, oiling beaches across South Wales, Skomer Island and the North Devon coast before the wrecked tanker, her cargo mostly offloaded to other ships, was finally towed out and scuttled in the North Atlantic on 31 October, requiring exactly the kind of steady, coordinated response work a fishery protection vessel was well suited to leading.

A Search Off Fair Isle and a Grim Recovery

HMS Orkney joined the search for the Banff-registered trawler Ocean Monarch, lost with all seven of her crew in a storm-force gale off Shetland in December 1979. Contact with the vessel was lost in the small hours of 15 December; an RAF Nimrod, HMS Orkney and eight fishing vessels combed the area, finding only debris and two empty life-rafts before the search was called off the following afternoon. Most of the missing men came from the small fishing port of Buckie, which had already lost another trawler, the Corinthia, just six months earlier, a second tragedy the community could ill afford.

She carried out a considerably grimmer task in January 1984, joining the search after the Liberian freighter Radiant Med capsized and sank roughly 15 miles off Guernsey in a Force 11 gale, technically within the French search-and-rescue zone and attended by the French warship Casablanca alongside the St Peter Port lifeboat and a Sea King helicopter from RNAS Culdrose. The lifeboat, thrown onto her beam in forty-foot seas, pulled nine survivors from the water; fourteen bodies were recovered over the following days, sombre work that fell to whatever vessel happened to be best placed to respond, regardless of how difficult the task at hand might be.

A Fishing Dispute With France

HMS Orkney found herself involved in a fishing dispute with France around the Channel Islands in 1993, a reminder that even within the European Community, disputes over fishing rights could still produce genuine on-the-water tension requiring a naval presence to help manage.

That dispute has a name and a considerably better story than the summary suggests. Until 1992 the waters round the Channel Islands had been open to fishermen of any nationality, and the French worked a large crab and lobster fishery there. In September 1992 Britain persuaded the European Union to recognise a three-mile zone round the islands reserved to Channel Islands boats, and a further zone out to six miles reserved to Channel Islands and British ones. The French fleet did not accept it, and said so.

It came to a head between 26 March and 2 April 1993, and Orkney is the ship that started it. She stopped two French boats setting pots inside the six-mile limit and confiscated their catch. What followed is not something that happens to the Royal Navy very often. French trawlers surrounded the small patrol vessel HMS Blazer, fishermen boarded her, put her crew below decks, took her into Cherbourg and burned the White Ensign on her own deck. More than thirty French boats then sailed for the Channel Islands to protest, escorted by a French Navy patrol boat.

It was over inside a week, settled by negotiation rather than by anybody firing anything, with the French given the right to lay pots on a bank inside the six-mile line. Nobody was hurt and the whole affair has been almost entirely forgotten, which is a pity: a British warship boarded and hijacked by fishermen, and her ensign burned in a French harbour, is not a sentence that comes up often in the Royal Navy's peacetime history, and Orkney was the ship whose day's work set it off.

A Second Career With Trinidad and Tobago

HMS Orkney was paid off in April 1999 and laid up at Portsmouth Dockyard, with her bell and name board transferred to the Orkney Islands Council in recognition of the affiliation between the ship and the islands whose name she carried.

She was sold to the Trinidad and Tobago Defence Force in 2000 and renamed TTS Nelson, going on to serve that nation's Coast Guard for sixteen years, though not without mechanical and structural difficulties along the way.

She was finally sold for scrap in 2016, upon the arrival of her replacement, TTS Nelson II, closing out a career that had spanned three decades and two very different navies.