Change of blog address...

Due to a change in circumstances, I have moved the location of this blog.

You can now access my blog by visiting www.buttertrain.blogspot.com

The end of summer leave, time for work...

At the end of August, after 5 weeks of driving in the worst terrains I've ever encountered, we arrived in Ulaanbaatar, 96th across the line, although not many teams arriving before us actually finished with their car. Our car was pretty battered, but nevertheless was there and ready to go to auction, or however AFDM (Adventures For Development Mongolia) want to use it. Both Olly and I were in good spirits throughout and really enjoyed a few days of reminiscing on adventures with the other teams that crossed the line during that period.
Since the rally, I’ve flown from Ulaanbaatar to Berlin to London, and from London to Lisbon to Fortaleza where I spent 2 weeks with my girlfriend and also had an amazingly cultured and out of this world experience- as if Mongolia wasn’t enough! I was then due to meet the ship in Uruguay- but the stop was cancelled, so I then flew from Fortaleza to Lisbon to London, and the next day from Brize Norton to Ascension Island- and eventually after a 16 hour delay, to the Falkland Islands. In total, during this summer leave period while I have been away from work, I have travelled over 32,000 miles, so I am quite glad to be settling down with the ship in the Falklands.

The trip down from Brize Norton gave me a great view of Tenerife- I managed to get his photo looking out the window.

Now that I am back in the Falklands, and have met back up with the ship, it’s back down to hard graft for a few months. There’s not much chance for me to visit the penguins this time round, because of a fairly tight routine, but anything exciting I do see, I will be updating this blog!

Awesome mods

Having problems with our suspension dampers, so the easier way to deal with it is to eliminate them! The micra now has rear coils twice the original thickness, straight out of a mercedes, they were snapped in a previous accident, but they's perfect for our car, which now rolls along like a limousine- despite looking like a hotrod! This is our car sat at the russia/kazakhstan border near semey. Only 2000 miles or so until the finish in ulaanbaatar!

Travelling to mongolia...

Travelling to mongolia is all the more fun when you come across a spray paint shop! Since odessa, our micra has looked particularly rally-ish! This is us waiting by the side of a motorway- and behind us is team 'let's get ready to mongol'... Somewhere behind them is team 'cornwall to mongolia' being investigated and probably fined by russian police.

Wow. How tiring a few weeks can be. BOST is finished, we've been home for a few weeks, just had families day, and despite the attention-sapping world cup, I've been doing lots of PR work for the Mongol Rally, which is now less than 2 weeks away! How scary!

I'm loving the Gloucester at the moment. We're in about as good condition as a destroyer of this age can be, the deployment looks exciting enough, but having them give me almost 2 months off to compete in the Mongol Rally, and also the chance to see my girlfriend in Brazil, has been more than I could ever have imagined. Pretty good way to serve out the remainder of your career...

So here's some of the photos, and a reminder to get sponsoring us. We need everyone's donations if we're going to reach £3000 for charity. www.justgiving.com/gcgb.

And the next thing is this- just round the corner now!

BOST: Week 6

The first website I visit when I log into my computer, is the BBC news website. Today one article argued that day-dreaming for about half an hour can improve concentration for the rest of the day. I whole-heartedly agree with this, and so sat down and shut my eyes, allowing my thoughts to vanish and my mind to take a wander... until 30 seconds later I was abruptly woken by machine gun fire from the GPMG machine gun on the deck above my head. The ship then went into attack mode, which means 30 knots on the 2 olympus engines, and lots of swerving about to concentrate firepower on the jets swirling around above our heads. I wasn't heavily involved in this exercise- it was more of a practice for the war-fairies in the operations room, but as you can tell from the picture above, moving about the ship is like being a marble in a game of labyrinth. It's not too bad if you're somewhere that you can keep focus on the horizon- but deep in the ship, especially at the forward and aft ends, it's a complete nightmare!

So, what's going on then? Well, here's the official script that came through just before last weekend, as we were about to enter the harbour...

(HMS GLOUCESTER is currently on patrol South of 'Brownia')

Human intelligence sources have revealed that the Peoples Front of Ginger (PFG) activity has increased in the last 24hrs and that this small, but highly determined group, have been operating small craft in the littoral. It is believed that the PFG may be planning a headline-grabbing spectacular. A British naval unit would certainly make an attractive target and our presence in the area has been very well publicised in the world’s media. Threats are likely to include, but not limited to, jet-skis, speed boats and other pleasure craft likely to adopt suicide tactics...

So as you can see, we're a little busy. We've also been refuelling at sea, "Fred" has been jumping over the ship's side with alarming and suicidal regularity, and we took just 4 hours to rescue a town battered by a hurricane and a flood a couple of weeks ago. There's also been car bombs and bandits trying all sorts of things every couple of days, and today we boarded a small vessel who had stowed about £3 billion pounds worth of illegal.... sherbert. Pah- these Plymouth barbarians.

Little Sullage Pump

So, the other day I was duty, and we had to empty one of the sullage tanks. The Sullage people came to us, and gave us a pump to boost the suction at our end, and, after leaving it to do it's job, I suddenly realised IT WAS ALIVE.... (and hence I filmed it, wrote some music for it, and put it all together in this comical little production...)

BOST: Week 3

Despite being taken on my really rubbish phone-camera, I really like these photos. They've come out really grey, which is exactly how I feel at the moment. This photo above, shows all the ships on exercise with us at the moment. There's a type 23 frigate close by, a couple of RFA ships, and HMS Ocean in the distance. There's a couple more too, but they had the luxury of docking alongside a wall instead of anchoring. Every time I see Ocean, I can't help thinking how ridiculously mean it looks. Well, from the side anyway. She's an amphibious landing platform... which means she doesn't deal with any jet aircraft, just helicopters, and marines. But she's nicely decorated with guns and other mean stuff. And apparently she's bigger than our current aircraft carriers, making her the biggest ship in the fleet... though I'm not so sure whether that's a fact or not.

So away from the macho stuff, I'm really bunged up, ill, tired, worn out etc etc... and I lost my voice this week, bizarrely. Everyone found that rather amusing. But the long hard days continue, and the drills and exercises are picking up more pace... It's been 3 weeks for me now, so I'm looking forward to a weekend back home soon! I think most of the mess feels the same too, judging by the mood. Don't get me wrong though, there is a lot of exhilarating evolutions taking place... but it's in the down-time; when you are always alert and waiting for something else to happen, that you find yourself wearing thin. All this in preparation for a "possibility". Buster reminded me the other day: "It's weird isn't it!? The way we live- what we're doing, what we have to put up with, how we live our lives. I mean really- who lives like this...?!"

Feeling the the first signs of Fatigue

Sleep is a precious commodity during BOST. Tonight, after writing this, I will get a solitary hour, go on watch between midnight and 4am, then treat myself to 3 hours sleep before getting involved in a Galley fire exercise. That's not so bad, as I will be largely inactive for the rest of the day, but as our programme becomes more and more hectic, people's heads will be dropping on anything soft at any time of the day... if they can get away with it!

Today we had our first 'Thursday War', where we were thrown from port to starboard with up to 40 degrees of roll as we er.... dodged incoming bombs. Quite exciting actually, as we haven't done one of these wars in almost a year now.

So as exciting as it seems, it's already starting to wear me down, and I am already looking forward to my real travels that take place later this year.

I'm going to visit all these places over the next year: France, Belgium, Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Brazil, The Falkland Islands, Chile... and if I have my way, China, Bolivia, Peru and Brazil again! So if anyone knows any people in any of these places, or thinks there's something I should definitely not miss out on, please let me know, as I will mostly be on an aimless adventure! Many of these countries are part of 'The Mongol Rally', which I am participating in this year, over the summer. You can track my position on that by visiting http://www.gcgb.org.uk/

But right now it's back to fighting bomber aircraft and losing sleep...

Choo Choo!!! Off to Plymouth...

Having received an update from the media officer on board HMS Gloucester (below, sailing past HMS Daring, the new Type 45 destroyer, and our replacement eventually), and been made aware of the latest blogging regulations, (I had decided to stop blogging for a while, just to be sure I wasn't causing trouble), I am now able to vainly splutter on about almost anything I like.

So where am I?
Well, Plymouth mostly. We're on what the Royal Navy call "BOST" (Basic Operational Sea Training). This is, basically, lots of very experienced officers throwing lots of problems at us, and we have to deal with it for 8 weeks. Oh, and we have a war every Thursday, usually with 3 or 4 other ships, RFA tankers, and plenty of aircraft who seem hell-bent on bombing us all day long. We also have to deal with terrorists, (sometimes they look exactly like Royal Marines), fires, floods, bomb threats, hurricane and earthquake-ravaged towns, dead/dying people, and a broken bridge in need of repair above a stream of red-hot lava. (Last year I fell in...)

After all that, we should be ready to face the world.

More interestingly, whilst having a drink in 'The Barbican' area of Plymouth, I gatecrashed someones 30th birthday celebrations last week, where there was a Beatles tribute band playing. I couldn't help but notice one of my long lost brothers, who was to say the least, highly embarrassed by the occurrence, especially in front of his girlfriend. He did let me have this photo though.