February and March issues of Warships IFR

All four issues of Warships IFR magazine with my story of going north with HMCS Margaret Brooke on Operation Nanook in August 2022 have now been released, in the UK at least. So far only the December and January issues have appeared on the shelf at Atlantic News.

This is the January 2023 issue on the shelf at Atlantic News about two weeks ago. 

 

The magazine to the right in the photo above, of Canadian Naval Review Volume 18 #3, is also quite interesting and includes an article about NORPLOY '74 - a deployment into the same waters Margaret Brooke sailed through in 1974 by HMC Ships Preserver, Assiniboine, and Saguenay. Though Preserver had some ice hardening present in her hull, the other two ships did not, and they had to proceed a little more gingerly than we did in 2022 - but otherwise several of the lessons from 1974 rang true in 2022. 

The February and March issues of Warships IFR should generally appear on Canadian shelves (well, the shelf at Atlantic News anyway) about one month after the issue hits the shelf in the UK. The mail from the UK is apparently slow these days.

The February 2023 issue of Warships IFR with Part 3 of my story.

The March issue of the magazine includes Part 4 of my story, and also features one of my photos on the cover - of three of the ships steaming in line astern behind HMCS Margaret Brooke.

The opportunity to spend three weeks in one of His Majesty's Canadian Ships, and the trip north itself, were in and of themselves the experience of a lifetime, but managing to take up so much real estate across four issues of the magazine was also pretty exciting. Hopefully I will manage to do something similar again one day, but I don't expect it to happen anytime soon!