Page 105 - Demo

101We could fly back all around the coast, but it would be a disaster if it went off when we landed. Eventually it was decided that we would have to jettison it. We were unsure if there had been any trials on this and wondered if it might hit the tailplane as it fell away. The jettison dropped the whole carrier not just the missile. Anyway, that is what we did and so there is probably still a carrier and missile in the sea just off Cardigan Bay. Later in May the Cod war started.The family always laugh that my only real war was the cod war. In fact we fought the cold war and lost many chaps preparing for it. We felt that a real war with the Soviet Union was inevitable unless we thought it was inevitable and so all the training we did made it unlikely. Any way the Cod war was hard work. Icelandic gunboats were harassing our trawlers fishing for cod off Iceland. The Icelandic Government had put a 200 mile exclusion zone around Iceland that our government thought was unlawful. And so the RN sent up warships to guard our trawlers. Basically, they tried to get between the trawlers and the gunboats while the gunboats tried to cut trawling rigs and so forth. It was actually quite dangerous as the ships played dodgems. Our job was to report positions of the gunboats and I suppose the trawlers as well. This meant a long flight all around Iceland at low level, identifying everything we saw. The weather was often poor and our minimum height was 200ft. We would have to directly overfly a radar contact to look down and see what it might be. One day with the weather a bit better one crew found an iceberg on radar and realised it was higher than 200 ft. If the weather had been bad they would have flown into it and just disappeared. I think they raised our minimum height after that. The RN wanted us to start our search at first light which meant we often had to take off at about 2am after a midnight briefing. I did 13 of those sorties including one in a Hercules. The workload was putting a big strain on Kinloss as we had our normal ASW training and SAR to do as