HMS Tamar (P233): Dazzle Camouflage, the Jersey Fishing Dispute, and a Race to Samoa

Built on the Clyde

HMS Tamar was built by BAE Systems on the Clyde, the fourth of the Batch 2 River-class offshore patrol vessels, lowered into the water on 10 October 2018 and commissioned into service on 17 December 2020.

She incorporates around twenty-nine modifications and enhancements over the related Amazonas-class corvette BAE Systems built for the Brazilian Navy, and carries a 30mm gun along with modern Kelvin Hughes and Terma radar systems.

The First Dazzle Ship Since the War

In April 2021, Tamar became the first Royal Navy warship painted in dazzle camouflage since the Second World War, reviving the striking geometric paint schemes originally designed to confuse enemy observers, a notably eye-catching tribute to naval history on a thoroughly modern hull.

What Dazzle Was Actually For

Dazzle deserves explaining, because almost everybody gets it slightly wrong. It was not camouflage. Nobody ever imagined that a ship painted in enormous black and white wedges would be harder to see; the whole point was that she would be perfectly visible and impossible to read. A submarine commander in 1917 had a few seconds at a periscope to judge a target's course, her speed and her range by eye, and then had to fire a torpedo at where she was going to be. Everything he used to do it, the angle of the bow wave, the line of the hull, the relationship of the masts, was a shape. Break the shapes up with hard-edged geometry running in the wrong directions and the estimate goes wrong, and a torpedo aimed at where the ship is not does no harm at all.

It was invented by a marine painter, Norman Wilkinson, who was serving as a Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve officer, and it was taken up on a scale that is hard to imagine now: some two thousand British merchant ships and several hundred warships were painted in individually designed schemes, no two alike, worked out by a studio staffed largely by women from the Royal Academy and tested on model ships viewed through a periscope in a darkened room. Whether it worked has never been settled. The statistics were inconclusive at the time and remain so. What is beyond argument is that it was good for morale, extremely popular with crews, and by some distance the most beautiful thing that has ever been done to a warship. HMS Forth (P222) has more on Wilkinson.

Jersey and the G7

The following month, Tamar deployed to Jersey during the tense post-Brexit fishing disputes between Britain and France, a visible show of support during a remarkably fraught diplomatic standoff, before providing security for the G7 summit held off Cornwall that June, two very different but equally high-profile home-waters assignments within the space of a few weeks.

The Jersey business in May 2021 was rather more than a show of support. Under the post-Brexit trade agreement, French boats fishing in Jersey waters needed licences from Jersey, and the licences that were issued in April came with conditions on days at sea and permitted gear that the French fleet regarded as a unilateral change of the rules. On 6 May something like sixty French fishing vessels arrived off St Helier and blockaded the harbour, with talk on the French side of cutting the island's electricity, which comes from France by cable. Britain sent Tamar and HMS Severn (P282) overnight; France sent two patrol boats of its own. Nobody did anything, which was the correct outcome and rather the point, and the boats went home the next day.

Forward Deployed to the Indo-Pacific

On 7 September 2021, Tamar and her sister ship HMS Spey departed Portsmouth to be forward deployed to the Indo-Pacific region for a minimum of five years, taking in operations off China, patrols around the British Indian Ocean Territory, exercises with French naval forces, and seabed warfare exercises in Australian waters.

A 650-Mile Race to a Sinking Ship

In October 2024, Tamar responded to the grounding of the New Zealand naval vessel HMNZS Manawanui off Samoa, covering 650 miles in just twenty-three hours to reach the scene, where she assisted in protecting the wreck and recovered the ship's navigation record book, exactly the kind of rapid, consequential response that justifies keeping patrol vessels forward deployed so far from home.

What Happened to the Manawanui

The ship Tamar was racing towards deserves her own paragraph, because the loss of her is a hard lesson and it was very fully investigated. HMNZS Manawanui was a specialist dive and hydrographic vessel with seventy-five people aboard, surveying a reef off the south coast of Upolu in Samoa on the evening of 5 October 2024. At about a quarter past six her crew tried to turn to starboard and she did not answer. She did not slow either. What they concluded, reasonably enough on the face of it, was that they had a thruster control failure; what had actually happened was that the autopilot had never been disengaged, so the ship was steadily and obediently holding the course it had been given while everybody on the bridge tried to work out why the controls were dead.

She struck the reef about two minutes later at more than ten knots. Full control was not recovered until 6.27, ten minutes after the grounding, when somebody finally turned the autopilot off. Everybody aboard got off; the ship caught fire and sank the following day, the first ship the Royal New Zealand Navy has lost since the Second World War. The court of inquiry, under Commodore Melissa Ross, identified twelve contributing factors and its list reads like a warning to every navy: training and experience, planning, orders and procedures, supervision, violations, haste, leadership, distraction, and hollowness, which is the service's own word for not having enough people to do the job properly.

Which is what makes Tamar's six hundred and fifty miles in twenty-three hours worth more than a line. A forward-deployed patrol vessel is not there for a war. She is there so that when a friendly navy loses a ship on a reef three thousand miles from anywhere, somebody with a hull, a boat, divers and a satellite link is a day away instead of a fortnight. Her sister HMS Spey (P234) does the same job on the other side of the same ocean.

Still on Station

HMS Tamar remains forward deployed to the Indo-Pacific, carrying out sovereignty protection, fisheries patrols, counter-terrorism, anti-piracy and anti-smuggling operations, a properly wide-ranging remit for a single patrol vessel and a clear sign of how central this class has become to Britain's presence in the region.

First UK Warship Visit to Ream

On 20 August 2026, HMS Tamar became the first Royal Navy ship to call at Cambodia's Ream Naval Base, docking for an eight-day visit that included joint medical, casualty-care and damage-control training with the Royal Cambodian Navy.

The South China Sea, and Five Years Away

After leaving Ream, Tamar headed into the South China Sea, where at the end of August 2026 she and the Royal Australian Navy frigate HMAS Perth asserted the right to navigate freely through waters over which China maintains sweeping claims. The Ministry of Defence did not give the route or the dates, saying only that the operation was carried out in line with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. In September she and her sister HMS Spey passed the five-year mark, 1,826 days since sailing together from Portsmouth for the Indo-Pacific, with Tamar logging around 15,000 hours at sea and 159,000 nautical miles in that time, only just behind her sister.

Pacific Partnership in Borneo

In September 2026 Tamar joined Pacific Partnership, the annual humanitarian and disaster-preparedness mission led by the United States Navy, at its stop in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, which ran from 2 to 14 September. Her ship's company supported the mission's disaster management and engineering work, and she opened her decks to visiting personnel, some of whom tried their hand at hose handling and pipe patching during a damage-control demonstration.

This is a live article which will be updated when more information is available.