Eight new boats for open water training at BRNC

Britannia Royal Naval College (BRNC) has taken delivery of the first of eight new boats which, the Royal Navy says, will revolutionise training.

The new ‘Sea Class 15’ work boats will replace the aged picket boats currently used by officer cadets for exercises on the River Dart.

“These boats will be a game-changer in the way we conduct our training. The picket boats are largely riverine craft, operated within the confines of the River Dart. The new boats are much better suited to operating in open waters, allowing them to break away from the confines of the River Dart providing us with new and exciting ways of developing training. The equipment onboard, and the new range capabilities that are now available to us, will allow the college to use them much more like small ships oppose to just river boats,” says Lt Cdr Mike Garner, the project lead.

Staff at BRNC have been getting to grips with an 11m version of the boat since the end of last year.

“Our river team are now qualified to drive the boats and our attention is now turning to the larger task of qualifying the wider training staff at BRNC,” says Garner. “They work in a completely different way to the picket boats, so we now need to take our time to understand their capabilities and redesign and reinvent our training programmes, as we wait for the remaining seven boats to arrive. It’s a huge challenge, but this will eventually result in, arguably, the biggest change to our training for around 40 years and will give us bigger and better options to build that naval officer of the future.”

The 15m boats are being introduced under Project Vahana – a broader programme to upgrade more than three dozen of the RN’s workboats (all under 20m long).

Under Project Vahana, the new boats will support diving and survey operations, ferrying crew of HMS Prince of Wales ashore, or conduct general duties.

Some, such as inshore survey vessel HMS Magpie, have already been delivered under the £48m contract with defence firm Atlas Elektronik.

They’re built to a generic design, with additional features depending on their task. In the case of the replacement pickets that means a cabin with bunks, living and working space.

The new boats will be in service at BRNC towards the autumn next year.