Shades of the Flying Dutchman here. Storm Dennis is battering Britain, a man washed overboard and:
Sixty-gun frigate HMS Winchester is believed to have responded to a relay call and is in the area, according to ship tracking data.
Hmm. The Royal Navy has’t been running 60 gun frigates for a century or more. In fact, the last 60 gun HMS Winchester was launched in 1693 and sank in 1695.
Perhaps not, eh?
Perhaps it’s just that the modern media don’t know anything?
Sixty-gun frigate HMS Westminster is believed to have responded to a relay call and is in the area, according to ship tracking.
Hmm:
Sixty-gun frigate HMS Winchester is believed to have responded to a relay call and is in the area, according to ship tracking data.
Sixty-gun frigate HMS Winchester is believed to have responded to a relay call band is in the area, according to ship tracking data.
The solution seems a little odd though:
Gusts of up to 50mph can be expected in some areas, with the Met Office predicting 100mm of rain will drench Britain.
The organisation’s director of flood prevention, John Curtin, is most concerned about rainfall in Lancashire, parts of Yorkshire and Cumbria.
He said it “feels like we’re at a tipping point, this is to do with climate change.”
He added: “We need to think differently.”
Climate change is raising centuries old ships from Florida reefs?
“A police RHIB is also on scene. HM Coastguard broadcast a relay to vessels in the area, and a Royal Navy vessel is assisting.”
Sixty-gun frigate HMS Winchester is believed to have responded to a relay call and is in the area, according to ship tracking data.
Alternatively, someone at one of the agencies cocked up and no one has bothered to edit it. Which shows quite how much care and attention does go into the daily press these days.
Originally spotted by Dee Castleton-Reid
The last HMS Winchester was broken up after WW2 and the RNLI don’t appear to have anything with that name. Typo for HMS Westminster (type 23 frigate)? It would appear so:
https://www.kentonline.co.uk/thanet/news/body-found-in-search-for-missing-man-222177/
The journalist also talks about a “relay call” when I think they mean mayday. There is a “mayday relay” call when someone passes on a mayday call they have heard but the emergency services haven’t received, but I doubt if that’s was meant here.
In fact the last 60-gun vessel of that name appears to be from 1822:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Winchester_(1822)
Ah, yes, but I actually read that. And that class were rated 60 gun but only ever fitted with 54…..
I shall be a pendant and go with the rating.
Either way, it’s on a par with The Daily Star’s outraged reporting of the Navy’s 183 million pound purchase of a five inch gun: “the length of a toothbrush.”
two browser tabs open, cut n Paste strikes again maybe ?
According to Wikipedia there have been seven RN ships called HMS Winchester. They list six of them. I can’t find anything about the seventh, no doubt it’s a top secret spy ship that Wikipedia isn’t allowed to talk about.
Or something. 😉
At last! A potential sighting of the elusive, oft forecast, ‘tipping point’. Worth a 60 gun salute.
When’s the next tipping point due?