Page 63 - Demo

59Our job in Sharjah was to deter Persia, (later called Iran) from taking over some island halfway between the coast of the Trucial states and Iran. We also had to look out for illegal immigrants, mainly from Pakistan, getting ashore. If we found any, we would report them and sometimes if there was a RN ship about, often a minesweeper, we would guide them on to what we thought suspicious. Any dhow with lots of people on board was obviously suspicious but sometimes the dhow would change its nationality flag after we had looked once and that was considered odd. One day we called the minesweeper to investigate a suspicious dhow, but they said they would in a bit as they were alongside a dhow that we had thought ok and said it had 120 people below deck. These ships were really quite small, and all had different names that we had to learn, the only ones I can remember today were Jalibuts and Sambuks. Once we had reported them, they had to land and then the would be immigrants were all heavily fined before being given permission to stay. The Pakistanis were actually required to provide the work force in that area, so it was all a bit unfair to them. In Sharjah and Dubai there were lots of silver smiths making quite a bit of intricate jewellery and I suspect much of the silver had been confiscated at some point from the immigrants. After about a month we came home and 42 Squadron from St Mawgan took over the detachment. They had never been there before but they would not listen to advice from the senior chaps on our detachment and decided to plough their own furrow which meant they did not get nearly as much flying done as they should have.There first task was to drop a generator to a minesweeper somewhere off Aden. The RN were desperate for it and so it was flown out to Sharjah and put into a Lindholme container for 42 Sqn to drop. Unfortunately when the container hit the sea, the generator fell out and so the poor minesweeper crew had to struggle back without electricity.Once back at Kinloss I joined Paddy McKay%u2019s crew. He had been a QFI at Cranwell while I was there and so I knew him although he had never