The Royal Navy’s Ice Patrol ship HMS Protector is on her way for an eight-month deployment surveying and patrolling Antarctica. She left Portsmouth late September and is currently visiting St Helena to conduct surveys of the harbour in preparation for the building of a new jetty.
Royal Navy ice patrol ship HMS Protector returned to Portsmouth on June 27 from her maiden deployment. The 5.000-ton ice-breaker spent most of her seven months away surveying and patrolling the Antarctic Peninsula.
The Royal Navy’s Antarctic patrol ship HMS Protector had to punch her way through ice to first deliver, then pick up a team of scientists as the pack ice threatened to trap them – and the ship.
Sailors from HMS Protector have returned to the exact spot where polar explorer Ernest Shackleton saved his men nearly 100 years ago. A team form the ice survey ship carried out scientific research at Point Wild on Elephant Island - a remote and forbidding shore where Shackleton expedition party spent months awaiting rescue in 1916.