HMS Hydra (A144)

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HMS Hydra (Pennant Number A144) was a Royal Navy deep ocean hydrographic survey vessel of the Hecla Class. The ship was built in 1966 by Yarrow Shipbuilders, on the River Clyde. She was sold to the Indonesian navy in 1986 and renamed Dewa Kembar.

[edit] 1970s

She spent some seven years in the 1970s in the Pacific, without returning to the UK, her service being marked by the issue of a Solomon Islands 45c postage stamp. Leading Seaman (SR) Pete Wooding (1925-2002) joined HMS Hydra in the early 1970s and was a member of the ship's company for fifteen years, through to the mid-1980s; he was awarded the BEM for his service to the ship.

[edit] 1980s and the Falklands War

In the summer of 1980, while under the command of Commander Richard Campbell RN, she was taken in hand by Ocean Fleets, a commercial shipyard in Birkenhead for refit, resuming surveys off the west coast of Scotland in the spring of 1981. She sailed on 7 September 1981 to conduct surveys in the Caribbean Sea, first visiting Dakar, Senegal on 24 September 1981 and Banjul, the Gambia before arriving Lagos, Nigeria, in company with the destroyer USS Conyngham (DDG 17), on 5 October 1981. She sailed Lagos on 9 October 1981 for passage across the Atlantic, arriving Bridgetown, Barbados for a visit from 23-27 October 1981.

Surveys were carried out centred on the waters around the British Virgin Islands and visits were made to Roadtown, Tortola before she spent two weeks alongside in St Petersburg, Florida for Christmas and New Year 1981/1982. A visit was made to St. John's, Antigua before her return to Portsmouth on early March 1982.

Her programme for more surveys off the west coast of Scotland in the summer of 1982 was changed by Argentina's invasion of the Falkland Islands in April 1982. HMS Hydra was converted in Portsmouth Naval Base for service as a Hospital Ship and sailed on 24 April 1982, in company with her sister-ship HMS Herald, with additional medical staff, for the South Atlantic. Her journey south took four weeks, including a short time in the anchorage off Ascension Island for replenishment.

The pattern of casualty evacuation quickly established, HMS Hydra worked with her two sister ships, HMS Hecla and HMS Herald, to take casualties from the main hospital ship ss Uganda, operating in the declared Red Cross Box, to Montevideo, Uruguay, where they were disembarked by a fleet of Uruguayan ambulances and flown by RAF VC10 aircraft to the UK for transfer to the Princess Alexandra Royal Air Force Hospital at Wroughton, near Swindon. The hospital ship HMS Hydra made four such passages from the waters off the Falkland Islands to Montevideo, carrying a total of 251 British military casualties.

After the surrender of the Argentinian occupying forces on 14 June 1982, HMS Hydra stayed behind as the Falkland Islands' Hospital Ship, based in Port Stanley. She also visited Fox Bay in this time. She was the last unit of the Operation Corporate Task Force to return to the UK, arriving to an extraordinary welcome in Portsmouth on 24 September 1982. She was then converted back to her survey fleet tole and resumed surveys in UK waters in late 1982.

[edit] Ship's Officers in 1982

For the twelve months from the summer of 1981, her ship's company of 120 changed little, except for the enhancement of wartime medical staff. During this period, under the command of Commander R J Campbell RN, the ship's heads of department were: