By Tarrau (Bamous British naval writer) Wer the slipped from our buoy and steamed out to sea for our night's
went with us. We had some distance to go before reach-grey bleakness of the winter afternoon. Other ing our appointed beat, The wind blew shrewdly from the northeast, to raise a confused jabble of leaping white horses outside the harbour entrance. One felt the ship, kick a little as she met the first of them. For the next eighteen hours, until we returned to harbour, she was never still.
Steam twenty knots, we passed a convoy of bluff-bowed merchant ships making up for their anchorage before dark. On one of the shoals to starboard lay two broken-backed wrecks with the sea breaking oyer them, victims of Y-boat mines or torpedoes. Merchantmen lay at anchor in the roads nearby. Beyond them the land showed as a faint grey blur against the darkening horizon. The visibility was low, the horizon to seaward being shut out in a blanket of mist, y of your We passed by a buoy or two, and a lightship pitching at her moorings. Night came. as we turned towards our patrol a st Lieutenant, for inst "shall me have the torpedo-tubes of the watch, lookout and myself were sea-booted and muffled almost to the eyes.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.