What We Do!

Hi all, how’s it going? We’ve now been in defence watches for five days, and it’s getting very same stuff different day, if you know what I mean. For those of you that are just catching on, or visiting the site for the first time, here is a little about me, and what I do. First off, my name is Andrew Robertson, but everybody calls me Robby. I’ve been in the Royal Navy for just over 11 years and have had a thoroughly excellent time. Obviously you do still have bad days, and sometimes they can be absolute nightmares. However, the good days are still outnumbering the bad, hence why I’m still here after all this time. I’m married with one child, and I live in Hull.
I am an LET(WE), which is a Leading Engineering Technician (Weapon Engineer) and work with all the different weapons and sensors that we have on board. My favourite bits of kit, by far are the ones that go bang, like the GPMG (General Purpose Machine Gun), the Mk44 Mini-gun (enormously high rate of fire) and the 4.5 Mk8 gun (the big one right at the front of the ship). My job is to maintain all of theses bits of kit and ensure that they are fully operational for when we need them, which could be at a moments notice, especially with where we are going. If you hadn’t read my other page, HMS Richmond, the type 23 frigate that I am currently serving on and is heading out to the NAG (Northern Arabian Gulf), for a six and a half month deployment (trip), which over that period I shall be keeping a sort of journal. It’s not going to be updated every day; however I shall be trying to do an entry at least once a week. At the moment we are somewhere in the Red Sea! And as I said we’re in defence watches working 12 hours about. I’ll go through how this works, there are four LET’s (me and three others), we then have eight ET(WE)’s and then we split half and half and split the day in half, doing twelve hours each. My watch, I’m the watch leader, is working from 0100 in the morning until 1300 in the afternoon. We then have our twelve hour where we can go training or watch a DVD or even do something worthwhile, like sleeping!! But not for a full twelve hours, that would be bliss!! Because, we are engineers we can get away with working twelve hour stints. However, the dabbers, sorry Warfare Branch, who operate the radars and sonar’s and things, can’t work twelve’s, they have to work six hours about as they cannot keep their concentration up for that long just staring at a screen! That probably makes their life slightly harder as they never get more than 5½ hours sleep at a time. Although having said that my wife might say I give it a damned good try at weekends when I want to play on my PS3…..Well, I think that’s enough for the time being, I’ll give you all the latest next time I’ve got a spare few minutes.