He must have been a really good Blagger - or had a lot of help from someone unknown.
Thank you. That was it - the Weather Surveyor. She certainly had a very long history. I'm sure it was the winter of 78/79 he showed me the ship's plans, because the next year, the winter of 79/80 I had stopped tendering for Robb Eden/Ronan and was doing them for Nigel, who was working for Danny on the Dutch side. It was a much superior arrangement.
I think it was superficially better than the Mi Amigo at the time, but approaching 40 years old with a very hard life behind her and in awful condition it wasn't a long term solution at all. In fact I don't reckon it was a short term one either. Being steam powered was a no-no for a start, conversion to diesel generators impractical and getting a tender to deliver the necessary heavy bunker oil almost impossible.
As you say practicalities were lost on Ronan and as for his suggestion to steal the ship, good grief!
I was lucky enough to be shown around the Ross Revenge in November 1979, after she was first laid up in Grimsby. She still had all her fishing gear on board at the time. What a big and powerful beast she was then (and still is now). As for her ever ending up as the Radio Caroline ship, totally inconceivable at the time.
Hello,
I know or at least know of the ship Weather Surveyor. She was built as HMS Rushden Castle early in WW2, one of many Corvettes used for convoy escort and anti submarine action. The ships were given duties beyond their abilities but carried them out all the same. Churchill pitied the crews of the Flower and Castle class ships as they rolled and pitched such the the crews were at times incapacitated by sea sickness while also being soaked and frozen. I think that one of these vessels featured in The Cruel Sea.
After the war some were repurposed as weather ships at a time when the way of reporting was to go to where the weather was and call it in. So Rushden Castle became the Weather Surveyor. I heard nothing about her while Mi Amigo was still afloat but the name came up some time after the sinking. I think she was by then owned by Harry Pound, the ship breakers, and Chris England and I went to try to view her in Portsmouth. A navy sentry headed us off but said that she was in awful conditon.
Ronan of course, suggested that maybe the Caroline crew could steal the ship. James Kay and I think Peter Chicago did go and take a look but the interior was unlit and James hurt himself badly falling down a hatchway. These ships had triple expansion steam engines and it would have been impossible to raise steam and depart without this being noticed even in the event that anyone knew how to fire the boilers and start the engine. Those practicalities were lost on Ronan.
Weather Surveyor was scrapped in 1982 and while she would have been better than Mi Amigo as she was in 1979, she was not a patch on Ross Revenge.
As a slight aside, I was doing a fair bit of tendering to the old lady in the winter of 78/79. Robb Eden came to see me one day in Ramsgate during that period and was very excited about a former naval corvette, converted to an Atlantic weather ship which was up for sale. He even had the plans with him and waxed lyrical about how it was a perfect replacement for the Mi Amigo. I never another word about it after that and don't know what happened to the idea. Probably just the usual pipe dream I suppose.
it was odd that a disastrous generator failure or whatever it was put the station off air, yet later that night there were coded messages going out on AM, meaning everything was working ok to some degree
And weren't there tests at various points during the 6 months off air?
Some on 963 and also some on 558?
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