The Smack Track

by Ian McPhedran

  Kelly says, ‘You couldn’t walk on top of it because you didn’t know what you were walking on, so we got our guys to clear all the packages and then individually check them, make sure that they were not connected to anything [and] make sure they were free of EO [explosive ordnance] before they were passed up, so it was a long process.’

  Every single weapon was cleared as ‘safe’ before it was brought on board.

  Positioning the dhow alongside Darwin was unusual and quite an operation in itself. After shutting down the dhow’s engine they used both the RHIBs as if they were tugboats to push the vessel alongside the frigate. ‘I think one of the big things to come out of it that really impressed me was that it wasn’t just boarding party doing all this effort. It’s great that the whole ship got involved. Everyone got up, formed stores parties, got involved down there unpacking the weapons, helping clear them and then packaging them up to get them onto the ship and again counting them in the hangar.’

  Each serial number was recorded as part of the counting process. It was a long job. The total count came to 1989 AK-47 assault rifles, a hundred rocket-propelled grenade launchers, forty-nine PKM general-purpose machine guns, thirty-nine PKM spare barrels and twenty 60mm mortar tubes.

  ‘So it was quite a significant find,’ says Henry. ‘Because we were able to deduce that he was tracking towards Socotra and then to Somalia, that gave us the authority under the UNSCR Resolution to seize the weapons, which we did.’

  Agent Lerza thought the shipment was heading into Somalia, from where it would be on-sold throughout the local region, but it was not possible to be certain whether it was an organised single shipment going to a particular group or just a general part of the arms trade. Either way, Hodgkinson believes it was a professional operation based on the fact that the weapons had all been oiled and were wrapped in plastic then wrapped again in a sack and all numbered. ‘Certainly to my mind it was not an amateur operation, just purely from how it was packed.’

  But they think lot of the weapons would not have functioned properly, particularly the AK-47s, some of which had mismatched bolts or had not been put together properly. Some dated from the 1970s; others were newer. The RPG-7 launcher tubes, for example, were brand new but not of good quality.

  The weapons haul was especially lucky for Able Seaman Pete Irvine – it was not only his boarding party who found it, it was also his very first boarding.

  Irvine hails from Bateau Bay on the central coast of New South Wales, and was privately educated at the Central Coast Grammar School. He joined the navy from Newcastle in 2010.

  ‘My reason for joining was my grandad was a doctor in the army and my nan was a nurse in the army, the British Army,’ he says. ‘My grandad started in the Gurkhas for Nepal and went to the British Army. My dad went to military boarding school – so it just came through the family and I ended up in the navy.’

  An electronics technician by trade, Irvine joined Darwin in 2014 and took his boarding party courses and his ship’s diver course before coming on this trip.

  Of the weapons haul boarding he says, ‘That was a long one. It went for … like two days. So that was a bit of an eye-opener for what was ahead of us. I think we went to boarding stations around midnight and then it was unexpected, so we didn’t know it was coming. We boarded around 1 a.m. and then we didn’t get off that dhow until about 10.30 in the morning. By then we’d found the weapons and [the ‘black’ team] were just coming on for the next thirty-six hours. But yeah, that was full on.’

  The haul made a big impression on him. ‘It was 2000 AKs – it’s like a little army. They could take out a lot of people. Some of the AKs, they’re year-printed so 1967, 1981 and all that, so you know these guns have been around the world before. I don’t know what they’ve been involved in but it’s pretty cool to see that we just took that ability off someone.’

  Navy boarding parties are not just a boys’ club. Darwin’s 228 ship’s company includes thirty-nine women, several of whom are members of boarding parties. Able Seamen Lisanne Hyland and Emily McNeill were both on board the dhow for the weapons haul.

  McNeill, aged twenty-two, joined the navy in 2013 aged nineteen and is a combat systems operator.

  ‘My job is to work with radar or sonar to detect the surroundings,’ she explains. ‘And if we find things, we classify them [as to] whether they be friendly or suspect.’

  Born in Longreach in Queensland, she moved around a number of small rural towns as a child because of her father’s work as a teacher and shearer. The family settled in Goulburn in New South Wales where her father now works as a wool agent, and that is where she attended high school. After leaving, she did a personal training course and, keen to get away from the small town, worked part-time as a waitress at the local Soldiers Club while waiting for enlistment day.

  Once in the navy, she set her sights on joining a boarding party.

  ‘I’ve always been a hands-on type of person,’ she says. ‘So I always wanted to be a part of the boarding party ever since I joined. I wanted to find a job where I could easily become part of the boarding party. So I do like my job as a combat systems operator, but I feel that I’m more suited to boarding party just because I like the physical aspect of it rather than just sitting in an operations room looking at the console. And what I love about it is that this is what we’re up here for – this deployment. I feel really accomplished being part of the boarding team. It’s very rewarding. It’s the best feeling I’ve ever had.’

  Not only was this her first, but it was also a night boarding. ‘We were always told the ships before us never did night boardings, and [friends] said to us, “Oh you’ll never do a night boarding, they’ll just wait until the morning.” But my very first boarding I was woken up at midnight and we had fifteen minutes to get ready. It was just so surreal and we ended up having that massive weapons haul as well, so I don’t think anything else will be like that.’

  During the ship’s work-up period, Emily McNeill had been in the operations room and had not been part of the boarding team, so she had not been given the extra training for it. That meant she learnt on the job. ‘It was [my] first exposure to it and it’s been our best haul, so I’m very happy with that.’

  Lisanne Hyland, twenty-two, is a boatswain’s mate. She was born in Ireland and her family moved to Adelaide when she was aged eight in 2002 ‘for a better lifestyle’, joining her aunt and uncle who had already migrated to Australia.

  In 2014, three years after leaving school, she followed in her cousin’s footsteps and joined the navy. ‘He made it sound really good,’ she says. ‘I’ve always wanted to do something active, didn’t really want to have a desk job, so the navy was the job for me, I think. My mum was a bit iffy, thinking it’s a military job, but they were happy for me to do it. They knew I wanted to do it.’

  Before the weapons haul, Hyland had been on two ‘approach and assist’ boardings that did not involve any contraband. ‘It was pretty much just to get us into it, see what it’s like, see how boardings work.’

  She loves it. ‘It’s exactly what I joined up to do. Boatswains usually do boarding party gigs [and] when we join at recruitment they say, “Yeah, you’ll be boarding party, you’ll drive the boats and stuff,” so pretty much the exact reason that I became a boatswain’s mate was to do boardings. It worked out perfectly.’

  She joined the ship just after the work-up and at first she, too, wasn’t supposed to be part of a boarding party. ‘But they ended up putting me in, which worked out well.’

  Being there for the weapons haul was ‘pretty cool’, she says. ‘We had no idea how many weapons were there when we saw the top bit of it, and then we started getting lower and lower into it, just crazy … I was just by the nets when we sighted the first bags. We were there for most of the weapons they pulled out.’

  She is not deterred by her experiences of searching filthy, stinking dhows. ‘I enjoy it all. I can’t really think of anything that’s difficult about it.’r />
  Emily McNeill says the hardest part for her is the actual boarding – climbing up on the ladder.

  ‘Especially in the sea state we’ve been having,’ she says. ‘Getting on and off is quite challenging, especially when we have to try and time it with the movement of the waves to jump on, but that’s what I love so much about it. I love how challenging it is and I love getting involved. And because we’re obviously smaller than a lot of the guys, they put us into the spaces where they can’t fit in to search to see if they hide anything in there.’

  Hyland admits the length of the boardings can be quite testing. ‘You get pretty tired towards the end of them. At one point our team was over there for about fourteen hours. So towards the end of that you’re just like, “Oh, I just want to go to bed.”’

  At the end of the operation, the master of the dhow, a Baluch from Baluchistan between southern Iran and Pakistan, was given an official receipt and an HMAS Darwin ball-cap and sent on his way. Hodgkinson is still uncertain about how much the skipper knew about the cargo he was carrying.

  ‘I think the way in which it happens in the port that they come out of [is that] a lot of these masters don’t have a regular run or they may not have a regular run. They sort of hang around the port looking for work and then an owner will say, “Hey, I’ve got a job for you,” or, “I want you to take my boat and go down and do a two-month fishing trip down off Africa and then come back.”’

  The owner will provision the vessel, provide the registration, pay for all the bribes and charges, and then the master picks his crew from among itinerant workers and fishermen.

  ‘Then they form that crew and so off you go,’ says Hodgkinson. ‘So this particular vessel had been in a re-fit period where the owner had said, “Hey my ship’s just come out of re-fit, I need you to take it down south and go and do this trip for me because I can’t go. I’ve got some other business here in country, I can’t leave but I need you to go and take it for me and I’ll pay you well for it.”

  ‘So the master then took it and went, and the whole time he said that he never does anything illegal, he hates illegal activity and he’d never do anything to jeopardise his family and so on and so forth. But certainly to my mind if someone had come up with this awesome deal and said, “Hey I just need you to go and do this run for me I’ll pay you well,” you would have the questions in the back of your mind … He may have known that he was doing something bad but he had plausible deniability and he wasn’t told so therefore he just went, “I’m just doing this for my family.”’

  Looking back on the many boardings they have conducted since then, Herrer says, ‘It’s just funny, because that was our first boarding. And when you look after all the fishing ones, see how it’s done, there’s a huge difference in the type of person that’s a fisherman. Their hands are callused, most of them don’t wear shoes, their feet are all callused because they use their feet in the same way as their hands with the nets [for] repairing them and stuff. And you stand there and watch them on a legit fishing dhow, they are incredible the way they pull the nets, they work perfectly as a team. They’re pulling them out, they’re working on them, they’re really efficient whereas all the ones that are a bit suss, whether we’ve got something or not, don’t look like fishermen. They don’t have the hands or the feet. And when you watch [real] fishermen pulling nets out, they’re working in shifts almost, pull, pull, pull – they just keep going, it doesn’t stop. I know a lot more now, now that we’ve been doing it. Straight away a tell-tale.’

  Apart from several souvenirs for the RAN’s historical collection the weapons were handed over to the United States Navy for destruction.

  13

  Dunnies, drains and dinners

  Darwin’s sophisticated weapons make it a lethal fighting ship, but there is far more to keeping it in top condition than meets the eye.

  Almost every day brings fresh demands on Chief Petty Officer Andrew ‘Goonga’ Sims, a ‘chippy’ (naval shipwright) who, with his team of technicians, is responsible for keeping the warship seaworthy and fully functional. Nothing can be taken for granted.

  ‘I’m the manager of all auxiliary machinery on board,’ Sims explains. ‘That involves the sewerage system, freshwater-making systems, all our air systems on board, whether it be high-pressure or low-pressure air, our main system for fighting fires and also providing cooling to machinery.’

  He is also responsible for the air-conditioning units, refrigeration units and all the damage-control equipment on board, and for rectifying defects around the ship.

  ‘In other words dunnies, doors and drains,’ he says with relish. Then there is the ‘material’ state of the frigate. ‘That’s the integrity of compartments – so the whole structure, bulkheads, deck heads, any rust or corrosion throughout the ship.’

  Apart from fuel for the ship’s gas turbine engines, fresh water is the most important liquid on board. It is provided by two main reverse osmosis desalination units, each producing about 6800 gallons (25,700 litres) a day.

  ‘We’re constantly testing the water,’ he says. ‘Every day we have to make sure the salinity is below its acceptance level. We’ve got four large fresh-water storage tanks. They hold roughly 2000 gallons (7500 litres) each.’

  The desalination units have electric motors driving high-pressure pumps that push the salt water through the filter membranes to extract all the salt and brine. They then treat it with bromine to kill the bacteria and make it drinkable.

  ‘Some people do say it’s better than Sydney water when we drink it, because you don’t get that chlorine taste,’ he says.

  In the old days evaporators were used instead of the ‘desal’ units. ‘We were always on water restrictions, shutting down the laundry and scullery, just to try and catch up with the water, and then we’d relax restrictions again.’

  Nowadays, water is rarely restricted on the ship, other than in foreign ports – such as Dar es Salaam – where the quality of the local water is either unknown or risky.

  Toilets are another necessity. They work on a vacuum system and are flushed using fresh water to avoid any build-up of potentially lethal hydrogen sulphide gas. Many sailors have fallen victim to gas poisoning over the years, so the sewage collection, holding and treatment compartment in the bowels of the ship is fitted with hydrogen sulphide monitors.

  Outside the twelve nautical mile (twenty-two-kilometre) territorial limit, the ship can purge the treated contents of the tank into the ocean, but in port the sewage must be stored and pumped into either the local sewerage system or a truck. Two hundred and twenty-eight people generate a large amount of waste so the tank needs to be purged every two or three days. In case the vacuum pumps fail there are three standard gravity-fed flush toilets on board for emergency use.

  Toilet blockages are a major issue for Sims and his maintainers.

  ‘The pipework itself is only 50 mm in diameter so we do get blockages where we have to pull pipework apart and unblock them just to get the system back up and running again,’ he says.

  Preventing the need for this unpleasant job involves education. Newcomers in particular learn that a 50 mm pipe cannot handle what a 150 mm pipe back at home can deal with. Having the guilty party assist with the unblocking process usually ensures there is no repeat offence.

  Day in and day out, a warship’s company is kept on its toes by a rigorous training regime. They train as if their lives depend on it, because one day they might. Barely a day goes by when the chiefs are not putting sailors through their paces on fire-fighting, toxic hazard or some other emergency aspect of the ship’s safe operation. From damage-control teams to weapons-systems operators, every person on board must be ready to act and respond at a moment’s notice. Well-drilled emergency responses are vital in a lone floating steel box thousands of kilometres from land with thousands of metres of water below.

  The senior sailors – the Chief Petty Officers – and their bosses, the XO and CO, take a dim view of poor performance a
nd often order a repeat performance until the job is right.

  For Sims’ boss, the Marine Engineering Officer, Lieutenant Commander Trevor Henderson, the Darwin deployment was his first on a guided missile frigate and the culmination of a forty-two-year naval career. His only regret was that he did not make the move sooner – Henderson has served on numerous navy ships but regards Darwin as the best in the fleet.

  ‘If it’s not the best then we must be number two but I think we’re the best,’ he says proudly.

  He jumped at the chance to ‘have a drive’ on a frigate as the chief engineer before his planned retirement to a beach house on the New South Wales south coast in 2018. ‘That would be a good way to finish my career and I’ve loved it. The fraternity is very tight, senior sailors and junior sailors – very, very tight. It didn’t take me long to pick that up. Even though I’m an engineer I had to listen to what they’ve got to say and I’ve listened and taken it on board.’

  The navy has been like a second family for Henderson, who comes from an Indigenous background and was raised in a tough neighbourhood in the Canterbury-Bankstown area of Sydney. ‘I knew that I needed to get out and away from certain people otherwise I’d probably be in jail or worse. I could see that coming, I could feel it.’

  For the troubled teenager the navy offered stability, training and a job.

  ‘I thought it was the greatest adventure of my life joining the navy and I still do,’ he says. ‘Instead of being in trouble and going down a wrong path I was with good people.’

  He trained first as a shipwright at the navy’s old apprenticeship school at HMAS Nirimba west of Sydney, starting in January 1976. It was a different navy in those days.

  ‘When they said “two-minute showers” they meant two-minute showers otherwise you suffered the consequences, you know, physically, and that’s just the way it was,’ he says. ‘I just followed the rules and that meant leading seamen really dominated. You never spoke to warrant officers in particular and chiefs were like gods.’