Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum

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It's a bit difficult for me to say how many ships there are in the Spanish Navy. The English language Wikipedia entry has 29 whilst the Spanish Ministry of Defence website lists 105. I suppose it depends how big a boat has to be to be listed and whether sail training ships and similar count.

For decent sized boats I'm going to go with 29.

At any one time it's quite usual to see five or six navy ships berthed in Cartagena, one of the five main naval bases in Spain. Unless the other bases are deserted that must mean there are very few ships at sea at any one time.

Anyway, the other day, I heard on the news that the patrol boat Infanta Cristina had come home after five months at sea. She's been patrolling the seas off Somalia and mainly involved in escort duties though there have been a couple of skirmishes with modern pirates. It occurred to me that whilst I was in town I should take her snap and do a blog entry entitled Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum or maybe something starting with Avast!

The photo was pretty poor, into the sun with no contrast and lots of lens flare. Worse, just now, as I was about to post it I realised that my snap was of the Infanta Elena and not the Infanta Cristina (same class, different princess.) Elena hasn't been doing anything heroic because she's been in the local shipyards for ages after they managed to put the engines in the wrong way around after a repair!

I should have abandoned the entry of course but after all that research on numbers and which boat was which there was no way that was going to happen. The photo is someone else's. It's the heroic one.

Comments

  1. Mike January 5, 2011 at 2:26 AM

    ""same class, different princess"".....jajajajaja, very good Chris, very good. I Like this entry.

    ReplyDelete

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