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Fleet’s smallest vessel sweeps all before
her
Gleaner is one of the more unusual units of the Fleet, as
well as being the smallest commissioned vessel at 23 tons.
For a start, she is not an HMS but HMSML – Her Majesty’s
Survey Motor Launch.
But that apart, she still sails under the White Ensign, and
has her own Surveying Squadron pennant number, H86 – though
it is unlikely she would be confused with any of her bigger
squadron sisters.
Since a recent facelift, she also features a unique piece
of surveying equipment in her Atlas Fansweep 20 multibeam
echo sounder, which no other Royal Navy vessel carries.
This allows Gleaner to collect sounding from a broad swathe
of seabed, instead of the traditional line of soundings.
Apart from dramatically reducing the time taken to collect
data from an area, it also allows the launch to produce accurate ‘pictures’ of
the seabed.
Surveyors now store data on digital tape – gone are
the day of the painstaking process of creating a hand-drawn
fairsheet.
Her very first deployment set the standard for her unorthodoxy;
she headed straight for Earl’s Court in London – on
the back of a low-loader – in early 1984 to put in
an appearance at the International Boat Show.
Tasked to conduct insure and harbour surveys, her first active
service was conducted in the approaches to Portsmouth Harbour,
and her first ‘overseas’ run saw her working
two months off Jersey and Alderney.
But perhaps her most unusual feat was to deploy to Basel
in 1988, a journey of 460 miles from the open sea.
Gleaner sailed across the North Sea and off into the Netherlands,
exciting interest from the locals as she went.
Gleaner’s ultimate destination was Basel – 700
miles from Portsmouth – where the launch berthed at
Three Corners, the point at which Germany, France and Switzerland
meet.
The launch as a ship’s company of eight; the Commanding
Officer and Executive Officer (currently Lts Gary Hesling
and Victoria Gillard), a Petty Officer (Surveyor), two Leading
Seamen (Survey Recorders), a Leading Weapon Engineering Mechanic,
a Leading marine Engineering Mechanic and an AB (Survey Recorder) – a
junior team to shoulder a high level of responsibility.
Indeed, as Navy News went to press, one of Gleaner’s
ship’s company, PO(SR) Jezz Groves, the Cox’n,
was due to receive the Defence Surveyor’s Associaiton
2000 Annual Hydrographic Prize at a reception at Woolwich
Barracks in London.
Gleaner will spend the next few months surveying Loch Long,
the Kyle of Lochalsh and Lamlash Bay in the Isle of Arran
in Scotland before heading back south for further work in
Plymouth Sound.
Launch has mixed ancestry
A mixed bag of eight vessels have carried the name Gleaner
since the first survey ketch was hired in 1808.
The first was lost in 1814 after three years as a dockyard
lighter, and it was more than 20 years before the next Gleaner
appeared, an 1837 paddle gunboat rebuild of the GPO’s
Gulnare (1833).
Next was a wooden gunboat built at Deptford in 1854, mounting
howitzers. She won a Battle Honour in the Baltic in 1855,
and was sold at Montevideo in 1868.
Gleaner number four was a 735-ton torpedo gunboat built at
Sheerness in 1890 and sold 15 years later, while the next
two coexisted; number five was a 160-ton tender, formerly
the War Department vessel General Stothard, which was transferred
in 1906 and sold in 1921, while a trawler of the same name
was hired from 1915-16. A drifter named Gleaner of the Sea
was sunk by German warships in the Dover Straits in 1916.
The current Gleaner’s predecessor, an 835-ton survey
vessel was built in 1937 and took up minesweeping duties
in 1938. She won four Battle Honours, and was broken up in
1950.
(Ship of the Month July 2001)
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