Nickels loves the flying part of her job and through a diverse twelve-year navy career it is the flying that has been the highlight. Born in Papua New Guinea and raised on the New South Wales Central Coast, she wanted to join the military from the age of ten when she thought being a civil engineer in the army would be a great job. After completing Year 12 at Gosford High, she went to ADFA in Canberra, but after six months she had a change of heart and switched to direct entry trainee navy pilot. Unfortunately, she failed the pilot’s course so she then convinced the navy to allow her to go back to ADFA to complete a science degree, as well as the aviation observer’s course.
Her first job was with 723 Squadron, which flies the Squirrel training helicopter, and she deployed to Afghanistan in a ground job for six months. Upon her return she converted to the Seahawk and joined 816 Squadron as an Aviation Warfare Officer, formerly called ‘observers’ in helicopters.
‘We sit in the front left seat of the helicopter and we control the mission,’ she says. ‘We do have basic piloting skills. I can fly a helicopter, although you probably don’t want me to, but I definitely can. We do navigation and radios and things like that and then we control the anti-submarine warfare mission, we control the anti-surface warfare mission using both the sensor operator in the back and getting the pilot to basically fly us around. It’s a neat job.’
While admitting to vertigo if she stands on a chair Nickels simply loves the flying aspect of her job. ‘You get to see so many different things. I’ve flown cross-country from Darwin to Nowra going through Broken Hill and then Coober Pedy and across – you wouldn’t do that anywhere else.’
Despite her love of flying her next job will be a non-flying position controlling the large flight deck and numerous helicopters on board one of the navy’s two new landing helicopter docks.
Between deployments, Nickels plays classical music (viola) and studies graduate law part-time as well as maintaining a keen interest in offbeat TV drama and comedy. On board Darwin she is renowned for her knowledge of pop culture and her eclectic collection of TV show boxed sets. Her navy career has traversed some challenging times for the defence force in terms of gender equity and sexual scandals, but Nickels is adamant that while she has experienced some sexism it has never been a major issue for her.
‘If you are female in this organisation and say that you haven’t experienced it, it’s because you’ve blinded yourself to it deliberately or otherwise, but in twelve years I’ve seen it improve,’ she says. ‘I have been I suppose lucky, insofar as I’ve never been the target of deliberate sexual harassment or anything worse than that, which is good. In my part of the fleet area, the people there have for the most part, I would say, almost entirely treated you the same regardless of your gender, which is awesome. I’ve had this conversation a couple of times with some of my girlfriends who happen to be pilots and observers in a fleet air arm and it is also up to us to stand up and go, “No, that’s not okay, don’t do that.”’
Despite the occasional bad egg and some bad press reports, Nickels says she would have no hesitation recommending the navy as a career for young women.
‘I would strongly recommend it to any of my friends who have daughters who say, “I don’t know if I should let them join the navy.” I would recommend it as a place to work,’ she says.
Hayman says that once the Seahawk helicopter is airborne and in a steady state flight, it is a stable machine. During surface search missions, where they fly quite high, the environment is benign compared to low-level operations. ‘If we’re down at 200 feet then a little bit closer to the water there is quite an awareness that if anything goes wrong you’ve got less reaction time, particularly if it’s catastrophic and you do need to enter the water.’
The flight simulator back at HMAS Albatross is vital for aircrew training, but Hayman says there is nothing like flying off the ship at sea to keep them on their toes.
Maintenance is a major issue for any machinery operating at sea, but for a helicopter and its thousands of moving parts the challenges are even greater. In fact the chopper provides more maintenance headaches than any other piece of equipment. Chief Petty Officer Nathan Blanch and his team of nine maintainers stay busy keeping the twenty-eight-year-old Seahawk flying. After every sortie they swarm over the bird to ensure that the vital piece of equipment meets the navy’s strict airworthiness requirements and is available to the skipper at all times.
‘There are some components that wear through more than others that require changing out or repairing or ongoing maintenance,’ Hayman says. ‘Our maintenance procedures are quite robust. It’s all set in stone with the publications and we have a good conduit with the shore base support services, the squadron and the assistance program office back at Nowra. So if we need information or technical support we can always ask for that. Worst case, if we’re not sure, we’ll stop flying until we get the answer to go ahead.’
That is exactly what happens following the engine emergency. It takes several days to get the go-ahead from HQ at Nowra to resume flying operations.
After the incident the engine is flushed out with a powerful detergent and the oil filters replaced before it is deemed safe to fly. The twin turbo fan engines are then run up on the deck before a maintenance test flight and finally the approval to resume flying is given.
The navy’s fleet of S70 Bravo model Seahawks have done sterling service but their time is up after thirty-odd years. They are being replaced by the new Romeo model Seahawk, and most Bravo models will be honourably retired by the end of 2017.
No sooner has the bird been safely stowed away following the morning’s drama than the ship’s company turns its attention to the replenishment at sea, ironically to take on aviation fuel.
This is a stressful operation for the two ships involved, and when the seas are rough it can be very dangerous. Tina Brown is expecting this one to be particularly challenging. There is a high sea state and the German tanker has only one refuelling point, located amidships. This means the frigate has to steam slightly ahead of it because Darwin’s avgas tanks are located at her stern.
The two vessels rendezvous at 11.15 a.m. and Phill Henry ‘drives’ the frigate from his place on the port bridge wing, where he remains for the ninety-minute operation, concentrating on speed and position and ordering half-knot or half-degree variations to stay the course.
A rope is shot from Darwin across to the tanker to guide the refuelling line – a black flexible hose about the size of a fire hose – to the refuelling point. Officer of the watch Lieutenant Casey Green looks through a special set of distance binoculars to monitor the exact distance between the two ships. Every thirty seconds she calls the number, for example ‘Sixty-five feet and closing’, so the skipper knows exactly where Darwin is relative to Spessart.
The only incident is a minor fuel spill on the deck at the end of the transfer, and the two ships part company with loud music blaring from Darwin’s PA system and some deft dance moves being pulled by the refuelling team.
‘That was the most difficult RAS of the trip by far,’ a relieved Henry says.
THE SMACK TRACK
16
Truckies of the ocean
Day four of the new patrol begins with no let-up to the frustration of the ship’s company. As Petty Officer David Herrer, the 2IC of the ‘black’ boarding party put it, ‘Unfortunately, it’s been a dry spell ever since that first patrol. The [rough] weather has certainly been a big deterrent.’
They have realised that the smugglers are becoming much smarter. But they have also gained a lot of experience conducting different types of boardings during the last two fruitless patrols, according to ‘red’ boarding party commander Lieutenant James Hodgkinson.
‘We’ve got our flag verification boardings,’ he says, ticking them off in his head. ‘We’ve also got “approach and assist” where we’ll come up to a vessel in the RHIB and just talk to the master. And then if he invites us on board, that transitions into an app
roach and assist visit where we go on board but we still have no remit to look at his paperwork or start searching the vessel or anything like that. I couldn’t tell you how many I’ve been doing – I’ve done heaps.’
There is a lot of friendly rivalry and banter between the boarding teams.
As ‘black’ boarding party boss, Lieutenant Robert Kelly, says, ‘We have to clean up after the red team.’
‘Yeah,’ says Hodgkinson. ‘We drill the holes and they fill them up, that’s how it works.’
Darwin is steaming northeast on a clear, moonlit night to the north of Madagascar at about 7 p.m. when the ship’s radar detects a thirty-metre dhow about seven kilometres away. When the frigate closes on the suspect vessel in a two-metre swell the lights of the dhow are clearly visible from the bridge.
XO Tina Brown is responsible for the safety of Darwin’s two RHIBs. The helmsmen sit in the inflatables as they are lowered into the maelstrom created by Darwin as it keeps steaming at about fifteen knots throughout the launch. Once the boats are in the water and tethered to the side of the frigate, a rope-and-timber ladder is lowered and in turn the two six-person boarding teams clamber down into the increasingly wet and bucking boats as water sloshes in. They are soon speeding across several kilometres of ocean towards the bobbing lights of the dhow Seena to conduct a flag verification boarding.
As I move from Darwin’s boat deck into the secure ops room the world becomes suddenly dark, with glowing screens illuminating the faces of the operators who are focusing intensely on their consoles. The imagery on infra-red and optical screens in front of the Principal Warfare Officer, Lieutenant Brett Schulz, is clear as the RHIBs approach the heaving dhow and the boarding teams climb up.
Schulz, who is on his first tour to the Middle East, sits in front of the skipper and continually scans the high-resolution images that show the boarding team herding the nine-man crew into the bow of the suspect dhow. There they are isolated so that the team can secure the vessel before searching it. The sailors are well defined as they move about the deck of the bobbing vessel.
Seena, which departed from the Iranian port of Chabahar on the Makran coast, has form, and was also intercepted previously by HMAS Melbourne during her 2015 deployment. This is also the dhow that French sailors from Nivôse had boarded without success several days earlier. They had spent twenty-four hours on board and conducted an ‘intrusive’ search, which included drilling 150 holes into the bulkheads, but they did not have an interpreter with them to glean information from the crew and left empty-handed.
Holes drilled during intrusive searches must be repaired if nothing is found. If contraband is discovered, boarding teams are authorised to conduct a ‘destructive’ search where bulkheads can be broken down.
Sitting in the raised skipper’s chair in Darwin’s darkened ops room, Phill Henry – who has a bottle of red with the French skipper riding on the outcome – monitors the boarding and is briefed on all aspects of the operation before he announces his intent. The briefing pack produced for the boarding includes a document from the French ship showing the extent of the holes they drilled during their search. This information is also passed to the ten-person ‘black’ boarding party.
After information from the dhow is relayed up the chain to the Australian Joint Task Force 633 headquarters at Al Minhad and Combined Task Force 150 headquarters in Bahrain, permission is granted for the boarding party to conduct a detailed search of the vessel.
The warship has been communicating with the dhow by VHF marine band radio, with the interpreter telling the master that Darwin intends to board it under articles of the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
‘Usually we call ourselves Coalition War Ship 04 simply because we have the big 04 painted on the side and there can be no mistaking us for somebody else,’ Schulz says. ‘We don’t necessarily identify ourselves by our nationality at that stage. It’s not until we get on board a little bit later on that we do that.’
They start by asking the master of the vessel some questions, such as:
‘What was your last port of call?’
‘What is your next port of call?’
‘What is your current tasking?’
‘What are you doing?’
‘They might, for instance, reply that they’re fishing,’ Shulz says. ‘Or perhaps they’re a cargo vessel transiting from one point to another point. We’ll ask them what their nationality is – as in the nationality of the registration of the vessel – and we’ll ask them the total number of people they have on board. If they say what their job has been then we might ask specific questions about that job. They might say that they’re fishing. We’ll say “Great, how long have you been fishing for? What have you caught? Do you have any fish on board?” We might ask them other questions such as, “Are there any weapons on board that we need to know about before we get over there?” And finally we’ll explain to them that we are sending a team over to have a chat to them on board and just to ensure that their paperwork is in order.’
Coalition warships do not board every dhow they encounter on the high seas. If the craft are not suspicious, they are allowed to proceed on their way. Alternatively, they might be subjected to an ‘approach and assist’ so that sailors can deliver so-called ‘maritime engagement products’ such as bottled water and energy snacks to the crew.
‘We find that they’re a great source of information, a great source of intelligence about what’s going on in their particular area, especially if they are legitimate fishermen,’ Schulz says. ‘Legitimate fishermen don’t necessarily approve of smugglers and as a result we get over there and we might ask them, “Have you seen any vessels in the area that are suspicious? Have you seen things going on that you know are there or have there been any pirates in the area?” They are more than happy to have a conversation.’
The ship also closely examines the vessel using its own sensors or the powerful cameras that are mounted on the helicopter, if it is aloft. However, the most effective method of assessing a dhow is by getting up close and personal either alongside or on board and the Australians felt that in the case of the jelbut dhow Seena a new search might do the trick.
‘We were aware that fresh eyes can turn up new things so we were just going to go through the same procedures, taking into account that the French had searched it for twenty-four hours,’ Rob Kelly says. ‘We had the benefit of having the interpreter that the French didn’t have, so could converse more easily with the master.’
Once Seena is secure, Paul Lerza and his interpreter are ferried across to question the crew as Rob Kelly leads his team on a thorough examination of the vessel.
‘We just went by normal procedures and recorded all the possible void spaces and areas where things could be hidden and they came back to me fairly early on and said, “Look, everywhere we’ve searched has already been searched”,’ he explains later. ‘Because we’d been burnt before, I was of the opinion that we really needed to give it a good go. So we sent them back to do a thorough inspection of every compartment with a fresh set of eyes and to really go through with a fine-tooth comb to find anywhere that things could be hidden.’
The dhow had a forward hold, a net hold and a freezer hold, as well as the wheelhouse and machinery spaces and a galley area at the stern. The crew sleeping area was a raised platform aft of the wheelhouse. ‘It was different to ones I’d seen before and there was a weird void space aft, but it looked unused and it was full of rubbish but we searched it all thoroughly.’
The vessel was also in better condition than many others that Kelly had been on. That is a red flag in itself.
‘The wheelhouse was actually spotless and there was not that much stuff in there, which to me is a tripwire that beckons a further search because it’s not what we’re used to seeing,’ he says. ‘Maybe this guy takes pride in his vessel and keeps it super clean, but this was the kind of boat where there wasn’t excess rubbish or tools or things lying around where t
here should be. Everything was spotless, which is uncommon.’
Kelly says the crew had an easy-going demeanour and their hands and feet showed all the signs of belonging to genuine hard-working fishermen. Sadly for Phill Henry the search turned up no contraband. Two hours later the dhow was declared clean and the RHIBs returned to the ship. Henry had lost his bottle of red.
Enjoying a cuppa at the wardroom table next to the sole porthole in the officers’ mess several days later, Brett Schulz tells me that English is a common language at sea. Many of the vessels plying their trade, both legal and illegal, across the Indian Ocean have masters who can speak some English.
‘We only have one interpreter on board and he might be conversant in several languages, but it’s not going to be every language that you could possibly get in the Indian Ocean,’ he says. ‘In the maritime world English is still, just like in the aviation world, the primary communication language. So while we are dealing with very small dhows that are usually traditional fishermen or owned by these guys, a lot of people do still speak English. We can at least establish what it is that we are about to come over and do and then once you’re on there of course the procedure of going through the checks is very self-evident and we explain to the masters what it is that we’re there to do, once we get there.’
The Smack Track Page 18