Sea Control - Sea Control 521 - Catastrophe in the Antarctic with Tom Sharpe (Part 1)

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

Links1. "Mayday in Magellan; Leadership Lessons on Flooded HMS Endurance," by Tom Sharpe, Wavell Room, December 16, 2018. 2. "Sea Control 440 - The Wager with David Grann," CIMSEC, June 29, 2023. 

Hey folks, it's Jared. This is part one of a two-part episode featuring Commander Retired Tom Sharp. It's a harrowing account of almost losing his ship in Antarctic waters. This episode was edited and produced by Andrew Frame. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication. And now, Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security.

Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Tom Sharp, and we're going to discuss a series of articles that he wrote, which appear in the Wobble Room. Tom, did I pronounce that correctly? I think it's Wable. Wable Room. Okay. Well, you can tell I've never actually heard that word pronounced. I've read it dozens of times over the course of my military career. Entitled Mayday in Magellan, Leadership Lessons on the Flooded HMS Endurance. So Tom, welcome. Could you tell the audience a little bit more about your background, please? Yeah, of course. And thanks so much for having me on. So I joined the Navy straight from school under the promise of doing my degree with them. So that was back in 1990. Then pretty much between the end of my degree in 95 and 2012, I was in sea in all different sorts of ships as a warfare officer. So very bridge-focused early in my career navigating,

and then ops-focussed later in my career as a principal warfare officer. I was very lucky. I had a good run of commands. I had four in total. One was in Northern Ireland. That was an early, punchy early command. I did fishery protection, which is a very demanding task, actually, in the Irish North Sea. And then the icebreaker ended up in full command of her after the incident we're going to discuss, and then went on from that to command a Totarae frigate, a sonar-equipped frigate. I spent a year in the Gulf with some US strike groups there, the Bush and the Stennis, and then a year back in home waters where we were the on-call ship to go and intercept Russian submarines. So an interesting two-year command in my frigate towards the end of my career. And then since then, I've left and I've started my own strategic communications agency. Well, thank you for coming aboard today. As a reminder to listeners, all opinions are our own and not representative of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. Tom, let's start with a little bit of the ship's history. What was his HMS Endurance? Where'd she come from?

Who built her? And what was a bit of her history prior to your taking command and your patrol? The UK has a long history of a singleton icebreaker operating down in the deep south. It was HMS Protector back in the 50s. Then we had another HMS Endurance, which of course became famous in and around the Falklands. Arguably, it was the withdrawal of her from down south that gave the Argentinians the spur they needed to do what they did. When that ship's life came to an end after the war, we needed to replace her. That was where we started to look to a Norwegian shipping company called Reba Shipping.

That's what the Navy did. they took Polar Star and took her off that shipyard, leased her initially, I think in 1990 for about 18 months before finally buying her, by which point she'd been renamed HMS Endurance. So she had been running from the UK down to Antarctica by the time I joined in 2008 for some time and against her design criteria, and we can come back to that, but she'd been a busy ship. She'd been up and down doing that enormous transit for many years by the time I got to that.

Now, you mentioned as you were talking about your background, your time doing fisheries protection off of Northern Ireland, I've spent a pretty good deal of time in the North Sea myself on exchange with the German Navy. It's pretty brutal up there, especially once you get out in the winter months, and I can imagine you were on a smaller ship. I would also imagine, though, that pales in comparison to what you see down in the Antarctic, both from a temperature and a wave height sea state perspective what was your own Antarctic experience at the point where you're assuming command what was the ship's preparation like for that deployment is there some sort of specialized FOSS that you all go through or is it just kind

of the crew heads on down I'm just back to your original point about sort of seamanship but ship handling in rough weather I had done a lot of it and I think that's important to this whole story because both the Northern Ireland Patrol Vessel and the Fishery Protection Patrol Vessel really centred around getting small boats away in very, very poor weather conditions. So I'd done a lot of that and it accrued a lot of time at sea by the time I was appointed to HMS Endurance as the second in command. But you're right, the Southern Ocean makes all of that look a little bit like a playground. It just goes round and round Antarctica,

giving you an increasingly large kicking as you get across Drake's Passage. ironically by the time you get to the ice the ice actually calms it down a bit so it tends to be less rough down there but obviously very very cold so the ship's preparation had actually been done by the time i joined she had deployed and i picked her up in the forklift and she had been through fast um through the flag officer sea training organization and did so again because we were away for we were deployed for 18 months and i think that's an important point to note here that's that puts domestic challenges into perspective. We went to Rost again during my time on board, in fact, just before the incident happened. I don't know what you or your listeners know

of Flag Officer Sea Training. It's an extraordinarily good organization. It's very tough. They run absolute standards and you're put through the ringer and it can feel very personal, particularly when you're in command. But they are designed for frigates of destroyers. They are less well equipped to deal with odysseys. So aircraft carriers, for example, they struggle a little bit with. The big red icebreaker, they had almost no idea. We were a commercial ship, as I said, taken off from trade. We had all sorts of weird and wonderful propulsion systems and methods and firefighting systems and hydraulic doors. So they would come on with their frigging destroyer checklist. And already you've got a

bit of a bash here and and one of the problems that that endurance had adopted over the many years was a slightly standoffish attitude to being inspected there was a sort of sense of we know what we're doing you don't so back off you don't understand this ship and that permeated through an awful lot of what we did certainly when i went through frost and from what i understand the period of training before she deployed there was similar frictions um throughout yeah my own experience with FOSS was again on that German vessel where I have the British trainers talking into my left ear while I'm listening in German in my right ear and then trying to communicate back and forth between the two of them. When you talk about it feeling personal at a certain point,

yes, you're absolutely correct. Because I want to say that the highest grade that you can achieve there is satisfactory or something like that. So it never sounds like you've done particularly well, particularly to like the american era where we use a little bit more hyperbolic language i think it's a classic british understatement but my impression of it was we were refighting the falklands war on a it was a 1990 commissioned german frigate at that point so a lot of the weapons that you would see on like a type 23 off of the falklands at that point and then a lot of the same tactics but you're right i tell anyone who listens it's the best training i have been through in 20-some years in the Navy, because it was absolutely brutal.

It's good, and they put you through, it's deliberately, well, it's quite well-paced. I think back in the day, when I joined, you turned up at Portland and you just got a thrashing. It's a lot more intelligent now, and it is paced. And despite the pain you go through, you end up a better ship at the end of it, because they stress test every department, particularly the set pieces like the Thursday War, where you're under simultaneous attack from subsurface and air threats. I mean, that's sophisticated and very hard to achieve and very hard to deal with. And if you can deal with that and everything else thereafter, it's quite easy.

But even in what I'm describing there, you can see why when an icebreaker turns up, they're like, okay, what do we do with them? We're not going to do air threats. How do we train this ship? How do we manage it? How do we do the basic damage control and firefighting stuff? So back to the sort of frictions and the endorsement of that ship being slightly subpar in my view. I remember leaving FOSS and thinking, and I was a very young bridge watchstander at that point, so I'm pretty sure still a lieutenant junior grade, but feeling like after that seven weeks, whatever you want me to do with this ship, I can do it.

From a driving perspective, from a fighting perspective, whatever you want to do, I can do it, which is why I say it's like. Probably the best training I've ever been through. But back to Endurance, what was she doing at the moment that the casualty happened? And also, one point of clarification, because you've mentioned a couple of times, were you the exec when this incident happened or the commanding officer? I was appointed to the ship as the executive officer. I was fully command qualified and had passed that board for frigate command. And that was one of the reasons I was sent to the ship, because she was away for so long.

clearly the captain can't deploy for 18 months on his own and so the plan was for me to take certain work periods off it to take temporary command of the ship uh now i wasn't allowed to do that in antarctica for various reasons but but mainly the foreign office their view was that the captain of endurance should be a four-ring captain so what i was allowed to do was work periods in south georgia and the south sandwich island and so that was the plan i'd been on board i think for probably about six months when the incident happened. That work period of just over a month, I think probably five weeks in South Georgia, had always been penciled in to be mine to be in command of. And that's what happened. So the captain was at home and I had temporary command

and we had spent five weeks in South Georgia doing what we... We really had three taskmasters at Endurance. First was the foreign office, as I've already mentioned. So our job for them was to patrol the part of antarctica that falls under their jurisdiction obviously nobody owns any of the territory there but we have a slice of the cheese over the antarctic peninsula so we would patrol the bases and make sure that everyone there is conforming to the antarctic treaty generally doing the things they should be doing and not doing anything they shouldn't be doing so for example if the argentinians were down there in a warship we would report that back because that's in breach of the antarctic treaty and so on so that was sort of you know tasking

one. Tasking two was the British Antarctic Survey, a fantastic organization out of Cambridge full of scientists and oceanographers and climatologists. We would invariably take a team of them with us. They've got their own ships, similar class ice-breaking ships, but no helicopter. Helicopters down in Antarctica is a serious business, and not for the faint-hearted, and we had two. We would do an awful lot for the British Antarctic Survey down there in terms of research and putting people ashore for their work. And then the final one, official stakeholder was the UK Hydrographic Office. An awful lot of the water down there is still uncharted, something like 80%. It's extraordinary. And the cruise industry is ballooning. They're

increasingly taking risks on uncharted waters. So we were there with our multi-beam echo sounder, hoovering up ocean bed data and mapping that out, sending it back to Taunton where the hydrographic offices we had a fourth unofficial stakeholder which was the bbc uh one of our helicopters had a gyro stabilized camera on board and so an awful lot of frozen planets was filmed from our helicopter which was fantastic because you were flying anyway so we never flew specially for them and we were very careful about that but we had a dedicated cameraman who was brilliant and you look around the ship than most people on board because he'd been there so many times and you would see the rushes of that footage that would end up on an amazing program like

Frozen Planet. You'd see it that night. So that was fantastic. So that's all we've been doing in South Georgia with me in temporary command for the period prior to the incident. We were then on our way to Valparaiso, which is in Northern Chile, nice sort of holiday destination because we'd been away for a while. We still had another year or so to go on this deployment. We needed a of a break. It was coming up to Christmas and New Year, so the plan was to go up through the Magellan Straits from east to west, and then up the western coast of Chile up to Valparaiso. There was a bit of disruption at the last minute where the Argentinians were kicking off about us going through Magellan. They basically said, no, you're not allowed, which was a nuisance.

That put our carefully crafted program in a little bit of disarray because we now had to to go around Cape Horn, but it got worse because the Chileans eventually then said, well, you can't come to us either directly from a British territory such as South Georgia. You need to reset. So we had to dogleg across Drake's Passage to kind of go within the territorial waters of Antarctica, the 12-mile limit, to reset the switches, which is pretty absurd if you think about it. And it meant for those 10 days, as we doglegged across a patch of shipping so rough, they

built a canal through Panama so the ships didn't have to go through it. And we went into it for 10 days and got a proper kicking on the way. But because we had planned to go via Punta Arenas in the Magellan to drop a lot of people off to get back home for Christmas, we needed to keep that intact. So that was when I took the decision to go into the Western Magellan. So we'd gone around Cape Horn. Nobody had really slept for about 10 days, but that's by the barley. We went into the western Magellan, the sheltered waters there, so that we could launch our helicopters. It was catastrophically out of limits for launching the helicopters out at sea. It was just about in limits in the Magellan. So that's what we did. And we were in a box there and had been all day

shuttling the helicopters at full, at maximum range to and from Punta Arenas, dropping people off so that they could catch their flight and go home. So before I go on to the next question here for the listeners. If you want to hear a little bit more about weather in the Straits of Magellan, see Control 440 with David Gran. He's discussing his book, The Wager, about an ill-fated British expedition trying to pass through those straits. But Tom, back to you, what indications did you have that you had a problem and what were sort of the immediate responses? Yeah, I mean, that bit I remember absolutely very clearly. Because we'd been at flying stations all day, I'd been on the bridge

most of the day because it was it was marginal even though we're in an inland waterway the the topography there is very steep and it faces northwest and the wind was coming from the northwest you know anywhere between 30 and 60 knots um so it's properly bleak um i i used to liken it to the falcons but without the whimsical charm you know it's it's a savage part of the world so i've been on the bridge all day when i decided to go down to my cabin we were still but I'll pop down to my cabin and make a cup of tea, check emails and all that sort of good stuff. When the first indication was a pipe casualty in the engine room. Now, that's not a good pipe to hear, is it? You know that something awkward has happened because it's in the engine room.

That was then immediately followed by flood in the engine room. Okay, right, here we go. Now, we had flooded the engine room more times than I care to admit in the trip. There were numerous mechanical difficulties with the ship. This was part of the gradual descent to what eventually happened. We had engineering standard difficulties on board through years of operating the ship against the way she was designed to be operated. We can come back to that if you like. But ultimately, we had put water that wasn't designed to be in the engine room in the engine room before. This wasn't the first time I'd heard it, but it was the concurrence of the casualty followed by flood that gave me that slightly sick feeling in your stomach. I went straight

back up to the bridge, obviously. To my left, around my chair were a bank of cameras and dials and bits and pieces. To my left was the engine room camera. I could see people already in there. This probably, at this point, would be going for about 30 seconds maximum. People in there were already sloshing around in their ankles, and I could see in the far corner an absolute wall of water coming in like nothing I'd ever seen. My first thought was, because I knew how much deck space there was below where they were walking, so I knew how much water would come in in the first 30 seconds, and I knew it was a lot. My immediate thought was, if we don't stop this, we're going to sink. I then looked to my right, and on the starboard side of the bridge

was that the damage control team were already there. They all stopped talking and looked at me. It was one of those extraordinary leadership propositions where, when it gets really serious, when everybody is under threat, there is a tendency to look to the person in charge for something. That, of course, was deeply uncomfortable, but fortunately, we hadn't gone to emergency stations, which would be your instant reaction to something like that. So I was able to order that in the calmest voice I could muster to take the ship to emergency stations, which elicits a whole series of reactions and counteractions, one of which involved not staring at me anymore. So that was a relief. I could then turn to the camera,

have another look at the situation in there, and then go back to the engineer and go, you know, what's going on here? What's caused this? Can we stop it? Can we control it? and those conversations took a long time I didn't, we didn't know on the bridge really what had caused this for about six minutes the fog of war, call it

whatever you like, I was pretty sure we hadn't hit something because we used to hit things a lot in an icebreaker and I would have felt that so I didn't think it was a gash in the side of the ship plus the thickness of the steel would make that quite tough so I assumed it was a

failed valve but I didn't I didn't know we had been working on a valve. This is one of the big communications issues on the day. The engineer knew there was work going on on a valve, but he assumed it was a different valve. And none of us, neither of us knew that we were one valve open to the sea. In other words, that valve fails and the water's coming in, which in the US Navy, the captain has to sign that off. We do in the Royal Navy now as well, funny old thing. But this was poorly executed work on a system that wasn't really responsible for the problem they were trying to fix.

And then the work itself was executed in a way that was poor and allowed this valve to fail in a manner that then couldn't be shut. The bottom line is we took on 1,200 tons of water, which is the volume of the engine space. We filled that up in half an hour. So it was pretty catastrophic. so not to derail the narrative but i do want to go back to what you mentioned earlier about the use of the vessel in the years leading up to this uh in contravention of the way she was supposed to be used can you tell us a little bit more about the what you're referring to there are we just talking skipping maintenance periods or yeah yeah yeah it's a combination it's a combination

of things i i grade it into in fact i use sort of joseph nye categorized the the requirements for a war to happen as deep, intermediate, and precipitating. I think those three levels work well for most major incidents as well, and they certainly do in the case of Endurance. So the deep causes were... The main one was the ship was designed to run with a crew of 35 people. We had a ship's company by the time I joined, about 110. For reasons that were never really made clear, we just kept getting people. I mean, it's a very naval thing, isn't it? It's to over-crew a commercial vessel. Just keep piling people on.

But what that does over a long period of time, of course, is it just stresses everything. It stresses everything on board. If you add to that the fact that the ship was designed to run from Norway up to the Arctic and do some fairly light icebreaking, some fairly light research work, it's much more benign in the Arctic. I know people who have been up there find that hard to believe, but it is a more benign operating environment.

and critically you're in cold weather the whole way whereas what we did was went from the uk to the antarctic so much harsher environment much harsher ice breaking through the tropics and ship wasn't air conditioned um so so we were really you know we were we were operating a volvo car and and as if it were a sports car and and thrashing it over over a period of time and And that led to that and the assurance thing that I described earlier, where the people who came on board, and it wasn't just FOST, either the flotilla staff, the engineering staff in Portsmouth, a lot of them didn't really understand the ship. So all of this just led to, over the 20 years, the gradual degradation in engineering standards.

So that was the deep causes. then we got the intermediate causes of which first at first amongst which was that um we were deployed for 18 months but with no extra crew assigned so we had to essentially gap we had to send a third of the ship home at any one time now on the one hand i've just said we had too many people on board so it's a slight contradiction to say that we then missed the third that we sent away but again our navy chops up jobs with such precision you know you have one person per system quite often so you start sending people home then those systems can you know the maintenance can be can be uh missed and ultimately the the person whose system it was that they were

working on that day was was in the uk and he was emailed they emailed him to say look we're considering doing this work at sea what do you think and he said i wouldn't do it i would wait until you're alongside but they never waited for that reply um so so there was this you know that That was the intermediate thing. Then we get into who wielded what spanner on the day, who tweaked which valve, who opened what, who did what to what system, which I would describe as the precipitating factors. Certainly, those are the ones that the inquiry focused on, in my view. The reason I wrote the section I did in that Magellan blog on the causes is to address,

I think, some of the deeper and the intermediate causes that were overlooked by the Board of Inquiry. so back to the incident itself is the crew's being forced to work in these flooded and half flooded spaces uh it was a shock to me because i went from my first ship in the pacific fleet based in hawaii over to that german frigate uh the gear that i had to wear uh if there was any sort of danger of like something happening to the ship so i went from like a very small mustang life jacket that i'd wear on my belt about this size that could then like inflate and like okay i put it around my neck and we'll be here in the water for quite some time whatever

it's going to be to the full body rig that i had to wear with the germans uh what were your sailors wearing at that point in antarctic waters as far as that they're sort of protective gear to move about these spaces yeah we had so the initial attack party went in there with what they were wearing clearly overalls and steaming boots and nothing else and they were running at this thing with mattresses you know doing all the things you're trained to do in the damage room to just try and slow the rate of water down of course it wasn't working uh 1200 tons in half an hour was just knocking them off their feet in fact that the noise of the water coming in was so loud it was drowning out the main engines which were both running right next to them so it was very very

dramatic uh it was pretty dark in there all sorts of equipment was coming loose um so it was unlike the damage repair units that you do your training and there's no one looking in through a window with a big red button to drain the water out if this goes wrong. So whilst the training very, very much helped prepare them cerebrally for what they were now being asked to do for real, it was still pretty unpleasant and very cold. But we did have very good immersion suits for Antarctic use. We were issued with these orange suits. Actually later on, once the engine room was flooded and we were out of the engine room,

people had to take them off. getting too too warm in these things so the the equipment in that respect was was was fine for what was um needed needed to be done but eventually of course the engines stopped working and again the problem with a commercial vessel is that everything's in one space or one of the problems in a warship it's everything's subdivided specifically for battle redundancy and you have engines in various different spaces and endurance everything of import was in one in one space and that was the one filling with water so as soon as we lost propulsion we went beam on to this horrific sea that we've been fighting all day and it was that was when the roll in the engine

room became it became untenable the the engine room was now you know half full they were going underwater all the time so that point the chief stoker who was leading the attack said right everyone out so you're forced to make a number of calls about this i recommend we'll link to the article in the show notes i recommend you go back and read it uh so you can read tom's words as he's writing at the time uh back when this was published in 2018 but what is the feeling about making some of those once-in-a-lifetime calls whether it's having to report back to fleet headquarters this catastrophic casualty or making mayday calls which no captain wants i can remember a captain telling telling me is like we had experienced some engine casualties like i'm not

putting up not under command it's like i'm refusing to do it it's like yeah and the casualty was resolved within a few minutes you're not in that situation though and there's really no choice like you're gonna have to make some of these calls and you're literally making uh what i think you probably recognize later life or death decisions about how long to keep the engines in operation uh what what did it feel like to make some of those decisions in the moment i think the first big one was was what to do with the ship i knew i knew we were going to lose propulsion that was obvious because because as i say we'd put water in the engine room before and it didn't take long for them to be picked up by the engines themselves and lose power so i knew we would lose power

so what do you do and my first react instinct was to look for somebody to ground the ship That concludes Part 1. Come back Saturday to hear the conclusion of Tom Sharp's recounting of the battle to save the Endurance. Put it on the shimbo now A pot of rum and a pot of gin, oh Way, hey, put it in the alley A pot of wine, both white and red, oh Put it on the shimbo now So help me, Bob, I'm putting it in the alley

Way, hey, put it in the alley Help me, Bob, I'm putting it in the alley Put it on the shimbo now Thank you.