I was on the Yarmouth from 67 to 71 bringing the ship out of the major refit for her first commission following the shunt with the Tiptoe.  There were a couple of stokers onboard at the same time by the names of Danny Danks and Scrumpy Woollard.  Now Danny and Scrumpy had something in common, namely they were both very well endowed.   After commissioning and work up we deployed to the Far East via South Africa and Beira Patrol.  Because the old man was very gung ho and a bit of a creep he volunteered to do Captain D's stint of Beira patrol as well so we had an eight week cruise of the port of Beira.  You can imagine that life became tedious on patrol, even the novelty of competing for the Beira bucket wore off.  Whilst in SA, Scrumpy had got hold of some happy baccy, and decided to break the monotony of the daily routine by having a smoke.   I had gone up to the bathroom to crash out the knicks and socks and Scrumpy was up there shaving with his cut throat razor, his eyes were glazed and he was muttering to himself.  Now Scrumpy was totally bombed out and if he ever joins us on these web pages he would be the first to admit it, so I did not take much notice of this.  He then nicked his face whilst shaving and when he saw the blood decided that he was going to cut Danny Danks down to size.  With this he left the bathroom and went down the mess deck.  Danny was lying in his pit reading when Scrumpy appeared brandishing his cut throat razor and threatening to castrate Danny.  Danny legged it out of his pit and ran up the burma road, with Scrumpy in hot pursuit, Danny got to the engineers stores, where he shut himself in and waited for Scrumpy to calm down. Whether Scrumpy would have carried out his threat I don’t know, but one thing is for sure, Danny was taking no chances.

Following on from the previous story in an effort to relieve the boredom of Beira Patrol it was decided that the ship would launch a life raft so that any volunteers who wanted too could experience the sensation of being in life raft.  Surprisingly there were so many volunteers that not all of them could be fitted into the one raft, so instead of launching two rafts an executive decision was made to launch the raft on two separate days.  The first launch took place and later in the day the raft was recovered with no problems.  This was not the case when the raft was launched the next time.  I am not sure whether we had gone to investigate a contact or whether the raft had drifted away on a current but the end result was the same we had lost the raft!!  Concern was setting in on the bridge as the daylight started to fade with no sign of the raft to be seen.  Day turned to dusk and then to night and still no sight of the raft, suddenly the OOW reported a light, revs were increased and course changed, we had probably only gone a few hundred yards before we realised we were chasing the rising moon.