HMS BRISTOL CAMP (JUNE 2012)

By Joe Collar

In half-term I went on a Sea Scout camp to HMS BRISTOLS, a Royal Navy training base situated in Portsmouth.  HMS Bristol is a decommissioned destroyer built in the mid 1960s.  It saw active service during the Falklands war.  It weighs over 7000 tons and can carry a crew of 397.


I have been a member of the 4^th Streatham Sea Scout group since May 2006 (I’ve been going for over half my life!).  I’ve learnt lots of skills- many of which came in handy on this trip. Harry, Ben, Lewis and Ewan also came on this trip.

When we arrived at the base we saw the HMS Bristol for the first time.  This was to be my home for the next week.  I was struck by how big it was compared to all the other boats in the harbour.  We were split into 6 “divisions” with Sea Scouts from all over England and Wales. We were assigned a “mess” which we would sleep in for the nine nights. We had lockers, and using my skill that I learnt from school, I organised all my kit into my locker. We each had to make a bed, and every night officers would inspect our rooms to make sure we were living under organised conditions and weren’t messy.

We were woken up on the first morning at 6:30 am, and I remembered I had been sleeping on a ship; the beds were surprisingly comfortable. The beds where also triple bunk beds! I made my bed the best I could to make sure I could have a good night’s sleep again.  We then had to get dressed into our uniform before we had a filling breakfast on the base, ready for the day’s activities.

Throughout the week, activities included:

• Kayaking on the Solent,
• Dingy Sailing, where I learnt to ‘catch the wind’
• Off Shore Yacht Sailing
• Codebreaking,
• Climbing (on a fancy mechanical treadmill-like climbing wall),
• Ropes,
• Power Boating on RIBS
• Navigation and Chart work at sea on one of the two "Fast Motor Launches" called Blue Swan and Black Swan
• A gruelling 9-mile expedition along the South Downs
• A reaction-testing device (you had to kick targets dotted around a room).
• A Trip to HMS Illustrious (a Invincible class light aircraft carrier)

My favourite was power boating; I even got to drive all the way over to the Isle of Wight! I felt responsible and was keeping my fingers crossed that I wouldn’t destroy a buoy or the boat itself!!!

My least favourite activity was the expedition. We were driven into the Hampshire countryside and had to navigate a course and answer questions about the surroundings and other things in general. We were given “ration packs” to carry all day which were about the size of a box of tissues, containing food that needed to be cooked over a stove, so we had to eat the revolting “pork sausage and beans” and other items cold. They also contained snacks, and people were gobbling Teriyaki beef jerky and Oreo cookies like it was the end of the world. On return to the base I climbed to my bunk with a gigantic sigh of relief.

Living on the ship was fun, and also quite challenging at times. It was difficult to sleep with air-conditioning pointing at me on the first night, so I adjusted it to dry laundry.

On the Friday morning the ship was swaying because of an aggressive storm (blowing a Force 8 on the Beaufort Scale), so aggressive that the gangplank to shore had to be closed off temporarily. That Friday night, we had a end of camp Disco.

The HMS Bristol summer camp was a once-in-a-lifetime-opportunity, which I would love to re-experience in the future.