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72about this time Air Traffic control asked what we were doing as OC Lossiemouth had seen us descending over a hill. We should have booked into the low-level area but knew nothing about the rules on low flying in the UK. Tom got a bollocking for that. Then the photographic section told me that we had taken some fabulous pictures and they were going to put them in to a competition. I was the Squadron Photo Officer at that time. They said it showed what could be done with the 12 inch lens and pointed out the cables out to the side of the aircraft. The 12 inch lens was telephoto but I knew we had used the 4 inch lens. Worryingly we had never seen the cables although we were only just above them. I got a couple of prints made for Steve to take to his landlady and told them to destroy the rest.A couple of days later back at Kinloss we had a problem with an engine. It gave a mag drop well outside limits. To try and cure it you run the engine up to full power, and we did this two or three times and eventually the mag drop came within limits and so off we went. We had hardly got airborne when the engine failed and so we did a quick circuit to land. It turned out that an airman had left a spanner on the engine and this was shorting something out. We had obviously dislodged the spanner with our engine runs but it had fallen back as we got airborne. Engine failures were not uncommon as the Griffins were getting very old.In fact, a month later we had a much more serious one. We were doing some kind of exercise over the Atlantic at night. We had had a disappearing radar contact which could of course been a submarine. We ran in to the datum point and dropped some sonobuoys but as we did so we ran into very fierce line squall and extreme turbulence. I was flying and to manoeuvre the aircraft to turn back and home back to the buoys was hard work as you had to come over one of the buoys on the correct heading to get to where the u/s buoy was. It was pitch dark and we