As you’ve read in Rennie’s post about a pause in Christmas baking and will read more about in another post shortly, all five of us have had a very unpleasant time of late due to each of us becoming infected with Covid-19.

It was therefore a delight to have something to watch from our balcony when a flotilla of Sri Lanka Navy vessels started to drop anchor on Wednesday morning, 8th December.  A quick internet search gave the reason why this was happening; it would be the Navy’s 71st anniversary on 9th December.  The reason why frogmen had been busy during the week before and marker buoys being left behind also now becoming apparent.

Each vessel made a direct line to its buoy, slowly and purposely and most with a spotter on the bow giving directions to the bridge.  At the appropriate point there would be a splosh went the anchor went down and the vessel would come almost imperceptibly to a halt.

Quite an internationally drawn collection it turned out to be with two former US Coastguard Cutters from the Sixties (P621 and P626) gifted to Sri Lanka a few years ago on their retirement from US service, two former Israeli Navy missile attack boats (P701 and P702) gifted to Sri Lanka in 2000, two former Australia Coastguard patrol boats (P350 and P351) gifted to Sri Lanka in 2014, and an advanced offshore patrol vessel (P624).  The latter was both the flagship and the newest vessel in the flotilla being purchased from India’s Goa Shipyard in 2016 and entering service with the Sri Lankan Navy in 2018.  It looked all glam at night as you will see shortly, but in the harsh light of day could clearly benefit from a nice lick of paint.

For the photographers; all the images taken in strong sunlight benefited from a circular polarising filter to reduce glare from the water and help the vessels ‘pop’ without needed to resort to post processing techniques.  The third and fourth images below also show why a lot of advertising photography is done at the crack of dawn with soft, pink, natural lighting.  The first of this pair of images was taken at 05:50am, quarter of an hour before sunrise and the second exactly at sunrise.  From cold to warm colours without touching a thing.

Steve