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May 3rd, 2008
| Post 31 |
| Optio | Heavily armed small vessels have always represented a serious threath to naval forces, from the age of small gunboats to the latest missile-torpedo boats. Knowing crews and skippers I can tell they're drilled to lay still in cover and just wait for days and weeks (like snipers) for a possible target, without giving away their position in any way. Among the MTB skippers you have the "Order of the broken tulip" awarded to those who somehow manage to run their boat on shore or hit a rock. Once there was a skipper who got "the tulip" for running two boats a ground on the same occation, and it wasn't his boat!  Story goes that it was a NATO exercise, and after an "attack" he was chased by two foreign MTB's tailing him in order to get a "kill" on him. Knowing his own boat, and the area they were in he went full speed through a long narrow passage between two small islands, actually more like one island cut in two pieces. He came through without a scratch, but the MTB's tailing him wasn't that lucky. Seeing him going through they thought they could do the same, but the first boat had "moved" away too much water and the passage was suddenly too shallow for the other boats draft... So they got stuck on the sandy bottom, and the second of the tailing boats crashed into the first... |
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