HMS Tracker (P274): The University Boat That Went to Guard the Submarines

A Late Arrival to the Archer Class

HMS Tracker, pennant number P274, is not to be confused with her much older namesake, the Second World War escort carrier HMS Tracker (D24), whose story of Arctic convoys and a wartime U-boat kill belongs to an entirely different ship and an entirely different era. This HMS Tracker is a small, glass reinforced plastic Archer class patrol craft, one of sixteen boats in a class the Royal Navy itself designates the P2000.

Built by the Ailsa Shipbuilding Company at Troon in Scotland, she was commissioned in January 1998 alongside her sister ship HMS Raider, a decade or so after most of the rest of her class had already entered service in the mid to late 1980s, making the two of them something of a late addition to an established family.

Teaching Oxford Undergraduates to Go to Sea

HMS Tracker's original purpose was thoroughly academic.

She was built as the sea training tender for the Oxford University Royal Naval Unit, replacing an earlier vessel called Loyal Chancellor, and from 1998 she spent well over a decade carrying undergraduate officer cadets out onto the water to learn the practicalities of seamanship, navigation and naval discipline that no lecture theatre can quite teach, part of a long-standing Royal Navy tradition of using small, sturdy patrol boats as floating classrooms for future officers who may never make the Navy their career at all.

The scheme she was built for is worth naming properly. The University Royal Naval Units are not a recruiting pipeline in any straightforward sense: each unit takes around sixty students from its local universities, pays them as officer cadets, teaches them navigation and seamanship in a boat like this one, and imposes no obligation whatever to join the Royal Navy afterwards. Most of them do not. The point, as the Navy is fairly open about, is partly recruitment and mostly influence: a generation of lawyers, doctors, civil servants and journalists who have spent three years finding out what a warship is actually like from the inside. HMS Archer (P264) covers the arrangement in detail.

A Change of Job, and a Rifle to Go With It

At some point around 2012 or 2013, sources differ on the precise year with the Royal Navy's own official page suggesting 2013 while several secondary sources place it in 2012, HMS Tracker's role changed considerably.

She and HMS Raider were transferred to the Faslane Patrol Boat Squadron, also known as Coastal Forces Squadron North, based at HMNB Clyde and formed in March 2010 specifically to help protect Britain's nuclear submarine fleet.

It is worth being precise here, since there is a separate, similarly named Coastal Forces Squadron based at Portsmouth that carries out very different Channel patrol duties, and the two should not be confused.

In her new Clyde role, Tracker became one of only a small handful of armed Archer class boats, her crew now carrying an Oerlikon 20mm cannon, general purpose machine guns and small arms alongside Kevlar body armour, a considerable step up from her original job of gently introducing Oxford students to naval life.

What Guarding the Deterrent Actually Means

The job she moved to is worth setting out, because it is more specific than protecting the submarine fleet. Britain keeps one ballistic missile submarine at sea at all times and has done since 1969, and the whole value of that boat rests on nobody knowing where she is. She is effectively invulnerable once she is in deep water. What she is not is invulnerable at Faslane, or in the twenty-odd miles of the Firth of Clyde she has to travel on the surface, slowly, in a confined and entirely predictable channel, past a coastline anybody can stand on.

That passage is the single most exposed moment in the whole deterrent cycle, and it is what the Faslane Patrol Boat Squadron exists for. The boats escort the submarine down, they keep small craft away from her, they stand armed watch on the approaches to the base, and they do it around the clock in weather that a twenty-metre boat feels acutely. It is also, unusually for the Royal Navy, a job with a domestic political edge: the Clyde is where organised protest against the deterrent happens, small boats have repeatedly gone out to obstruct submarine movements, and the crews handling that have to be simultaneously armed, restrained and photographed from the shore.

A twenty-metre boat is the right tool for it precisely because a frigate is not. She can work close inshore, come alongside a protest craft without endangering it, sit for hours at a couple of knots and turn in her own length, and she costs almost nothing to run. Her sister HMS Raider (P275) does the same work alongside her, and the other end of the same task, the frigate out in the Atlantic making sure nothing is waiting for the boat when she gets there, is described in HMS Somerset (F82).

From Weymouth to the Georgia Coast

Along the way HMS Tracker took part in properly notable duties beyond her day-to-day submarine patrol work.

She joined several sister ships in providing maritime security for the London Olympics and Paralympics, whose sailing events were held at Weymouth in 2012, though it is worth noting that the Royal Navy's own current website appears to misdate this event to 2014, an inconsistency worth flagging honestly rather than repeating uncritically.

She is also recorded as having travelled to the United States Naval Base at Kings Bay in Georgia to exchange expertise with American counterparts on the specialist business of protecting a submarine base, a rare piece of international travel for a boat barely twenty metres long.

The trip to Kings Bay makes sense in that light too. Kings Bay in Georgia is the American east coast ballistic missile submarine base, the direct equivalent of Faslane, and it has exactly the same problem in a different estuary. Two navies with four boats each between them, both of them relying on a handful of very small craft to get their largest and most secret vessels safely to sea, have a good deal to say to one another.

A Well-Documented Cruise Around Scotland

One of the best corroborated chapters in Tracker's recent history is a three week deployment around Scotland in 2017 under the command of Lieutenant Commander James Mitchell, during which she transited the Caledonian Canal to Inverness and called at Islay, Fort Augustus, Lossiemouth, Wick, Orkney, Stornoway, Portree and Tobermory.

The visit combined school outreach, joint training with the RNLI and Coastguard, seamanship demonstrations for prospective recruits, and even a helicopter winching exercise on Loch Ness, a proper showcase tour that multiple independent sources, including local Orkney press, confirm took place broadly as described.

Still on Watch on the Clyde

HMS Tracker remains in commission today, based at HMNB Clyde as part of the Faslane Patrol Boat Squadron, still standing round the clock armed guard over the waters around Britain's submarine base with a crew of around seven.

No record of any collision, grounding or accident involving her could be found across any of the sources checked, though the absence of such coverage should be read as an absence of documentation rather than firm proof that nothing of the kind ever happened.

It is a quietly unusual career arc for a small university training boat, from teaching Oxford students to tie knots to standing armed watch over some of the most sensitive military infrastructure in the country.

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