Graham Hall on Navigation
When I joined the ‘Winston Churchill’ I’d been at sea for some years by then and I had qualified as a Master Mariner and I then joined Trinity House for a variety of reasons. One of those that long sea voyages and family life weren’t very compatible, but I was interested in Trinity House and always had been and I joined them as a Second Officer, Navigating Officer on the tender in Cowes and my responsibilities were for navigation obviously, being a Navigating Officer and various other, but as a Junior Officer I was also required to do all the things like jumping on buoys, climbing up the sides of Lighthouses and anything that was a little bit wet and dangerous.
We all had to do it but that’s how we started, and we had quite a few exciting times doing that, very interesting times.
No two days were ever the same, there was always something different going on but as far as the Isle of Wight’s concerned, particularly, I mean our two big Lighthouses that we serviced were The Needles and the Nab Tower.
We obviously being …covering all that coast we did a lot of others as well and they were the immediate Isle of Wight sites that we did, The Needles and Nab Tower because St Catherine’s was accessible by road so you know, although we had an oversight on it we didn’t actually go there very much because everything could be delivered by lorry. Our function was to deliver things to these Lighthouses, make sure they were working, check that everything was working properly. We used to take out personnel like mechanics to fix things if they’d gone wrong; we provided them with their food, their oil, their water, their coal.