From Coast Guard chase to Nigerian thunder

A US Coast Guard cutter is visiting right here in Simon's Town naval harbour. Or it used to be a CG cutter, now it's part of the Nigerian navy. It has arabesqued from US CG cutter Chase into NNS Thunder, as of 2011. This Hamilton Class cutter was launched way back in 1967 in New Orleans and has a long pedigree of operations in the Vietnam war, Middle East and off the east and west USA coasts, at one point making the second biggest cocaine bust in Coast Guard history. Today the NNS Thunder and one of SA's corvettes have been criss-crossing False Bay on manoeuvres. I spotted them between waves at Muizies, glinting in the broken sunlight. The dust has still not settled from SA's big navy corruption scandal, involving the four state-of-the-art corvettes and three new submarines. The sad thing is that our navy is completely ill-equipped with the skills to manage these boats and few of them are ever at sea. The presence of NNS Thunder is a reminder that a much smarter move would have been for the navy to have acquired a fleet of smaller ships, of the type used by the US Coast Guard, to patrol coastal waters. The corvettes are way over-specced for our needs, to say nothing of the subs. You don't need over-the-horizon missiles to catch perlemoen poachers. On a more stylistic note, I also am not too fond of their light grey colour. A navy boat looks that much more threatening and convincing in dark grey. The Thunder's black and dark grey combo is the real thing. The QSL is from US Coast Guard in New Orleans, using just 1000 watts and an omni-directional vertical whip antenna, heard in Johannesburg up on 8 mHz in 1989. The Coast Guard are among the best and friendliest QSLers around the world.