HMS Shetland (P298): The Trawler-Hulled Guardian of Britain's Fishing Grounds

Built Like a Trawler, on Purpose

HMS Shetland was built by Hall, Russell & Company at Aberdeen, launched on 22 October 1976 and commissioned on 14 July 1977, one of the Royal Navy's Island-class offshore patrol vessels. The class was deliberately modelled on the ocean-going fishery protection vessels Jura and Westra, giving these ships a modified trawler hull that made them exceptionally seaworthy in exactly the rough waters they were built to patrol.

Shetland was one of seven Island-class vessels the Royal Navy eventually built to that design, all delivered by Hall Russell between 1976 and 1979 and named for British islands: Anglesey, Alderney, Jersey, Guernsey, Orkney, Lindisfarne and Shetland herself. Jura had first spent two years on loan to the Royal Navy from 1975, a trial that convinced the Admiralty the design was worth building from scratch, before she returned to fishery duty and was eventually sold off in 1988, renamed Criscilla, then N'Madi, and broken up in Portugal in 2001. Westra went on to a considerably more famous second career: sold to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in 2006, she was renamed Robert Hunter and then, that December, Steve Irwin, in honour of the conservationist and television naturalist who had died the previous year and had reportedly hoped to sail aboard her himself.

Backbone of the Fishery Protection Squadron

Shetland formed part of the backbone of the Fishery Protection Squadron, patrolling British waters and the newly established two-hundred-mile fishing limit, and taking on oil and gas platform protection duties around the British Isles and occasionally further afield around Gibraltar.

The Day Britain's Fishing Limit Went From Twelve Miles to Two Hundred

The class exists because of a single date. On 1 January 1977, six months before Shetland commissioned, British fishery limits were extended from twelve nautical miles to two hundred. That is not an incremental change: it took the sea area the Royal Navy was responsible for policing and multiplied it many times over, in one go, without adding a ship. The Fishery Protection Squadron at that point consisted largely of elderly Ton-class minesweepers borrowed from mine warfare, which were wooden, slow, short-legged and thoroughly unsuited to spending a fortnight at a time west of the Hebrides in February.

So the Admiralty did something sensible and unusual: instead of designing a warship, it went and looked at the ships that already worked out there. Jura and Westra were Scottish fishery protection vessels built to a commercial trawler design, and Jura was borrowed for two years from 1975 to find out whether that was the answer. It was. The seven Islands that followed have a trawler's hull, a trawler's motion in a seaway and a trawler's endurance, and they are slow, which for this work does not matter: a fishery patrol vessel does not need to outrun anything, she needs to still be out there on day twenty when the weather has driven everyone else home.

Rig protection was the other half of the job and it was new. By the late 1970s the North Sea was filling up with oil and gas platforms, each of them a fixed, unarmed, enormously valuable installation standing in international shipping lanes with a hundred or more people living on it, and nobody had ever had to think about protecting such a thing before. The work that fell to the Islands was partly deterrence, partly enforcing the safety zones around the structures, and partly simply being the nearest ship with a doctor, a boat and a radio when something went wrong on a platform sixty miles from land. It is why these ships turn up so often in North Sea disasters.

It was unglamorous, essential work, the kind that rarely makes headlines but quietly underpinned Britain's ability to enforce its own maritime boundaries through the late twentieth century.

A Quarter Century on Patrol

For twenty-five years, Shetland carried out this steady, demanding patrol work as part of a class that came to define the Royal Navy's approach to fishery protection during the period, her rugged hull and modest size proving well suited to the task she had been purpose-built for.

Twenty-five years of it is worth sitting with for a moment, because the job does not vary and that is the point. A fishery protection patrol consists of finding fishing vessels, closing them, putting a boarding party across in a sea boat, checking the licence, measuring the mesh of the nets, measuring the fish, checking the logbook against what is actually in the hold, and then doing it again to the next one, in the North Sea, in winter, for weeks. Almost every boarding finds nothing wrong. The ones that do are what pay for the other ninety-nine, and the ninety-nine are what stop the hundredth from happening at all.

A New Flag in Bangladesh

Shetland was sold to Bangladesh in 2002 and commissioned into the Bangladesh Navy as BNS Kapatakhaya on 4 May 2003, one of several Island-class vessels transferred there as the Royal Navy moved to replace the class with newer River-class patrol ships by 2004. She was not the first of her sisters to make that journey, Jersey had already gone to Bangladesh back in 1994, and she would not be the last either, Alderney, Anglesey, Guernsey and Lindisfarne all followed over the next couple of years; only Orkney broke the pattern, sold instead to Trinidad and Tobago.

All six of her sisters have accounts here and between them they show what the class actually did. HMS Anglesey (P277) was in the middle of the Fastnet storm of 1979 pulling yachtsmen out of the water; HMS Lindisfarne (P300) ran 180 miles to a North Sea disaster; HMS Orkney (P299) cleaned up oil spills and recovered bodies from a sunken freighter. HMS Alderney (P278), HMS Jersey (P295) and HMS Guernsey (P297) make up the rest.

The other thing that list shows is how comprehensively the class ended up in one place. Five of the seven went to Bangladesh, Guernsey delivering herself there under her own steam over eight thousand miles, and only Orkney broke the pattern by going to Trinidad and Tobago instead. The Bangladesh Navy got a whole squadron of ocean-going patrol vessels, built for the North Sea in the 1970s, for very little money, and has kept them working in the Bay of Bengal ever since. It is a considerably better outcome than the scrapyard and it is the reason so many of these articles end the same way.

Under her new name and flag, based at Khulna with a crew of around a hundred, she continued in active service, including joint exercises with her former parent navy, a fitting second life for a ship built to spend her days quietly watching over someone else's waters.

A Working Ship, Twice Over

HMS Shetland's career reflects the unglamorous but vital role fishery protection vessels played in Britain's maritime life, and her continued service under the Bangladesh Navy's flag is a reminder that a well-built patrol ship's working life rarely ends when the original owner is done with her.