Michael J. Sánchez observes his movements. warships entering Gibraltar. He says it’s enough to look out the window in his current home in the British colony, and he sees the entire throat. If he sees a ship approaching or passing through the port, he takes a picture of it and writes it down in his diary, which he has kept since 1977. These are usually British Royal Navy or US Navy ships. Next, upload the name and type of boat and an image to social networks. Y Discuss the “hunt” with a fan network From Gibraltar or other countries, from Canada to the United States via Turkey. Some of your amateur neighbors have powerful cameras to capture distant ships.
Say what Neither the Peñón authorities nor the military got him in trouble for his activities. “I do this as a hobby because I love the maritime world; “My father and grandfather were working in the port,” said the Prensa Ibérica group to El Periódico de España. 63 year old retired policeman from Gibraltar. On the phone with Spanish “llanito” with English touches, he explains that this is the title of his work. ship observation, ship sight like full English bird watching or bird watching (bird watching), “but more complex”.
This year, Michael J. Sánchez estimates that a total of fifty warships and reinforcements have approached Gibraltar. And all this while diplomats from the European Union, the United Kingdom, Spain and Gibraltar are negotiating a Treaty to fit the British colony into European space after Brexit. Have more ships arrived than in other years? Sánchez doesn’t give us specific figures or reveal statistics, but he doesn’t believe the activity is intensifying. It marks a clear decline compared to the last century. Previously, navies needed large numbers of ships at sea and could “average 70 or 80 warships per year,” he says. Now, with cuts and modernization of ships, the number has dropped radically, “to an average of 20 or 30 per year.”
The UK does not give concrete figures, and neither does Gibraltar. “We do not comment on the movements of ships or submarines,” a British Foreign Office spokesperson told this newspaper. yes we can confirm that HMNB Gibraltar (Her Majesty’s Naval Base Gibraltar) The base is regularly visited by various warships as part of its routine operations and as a hub for the Royal Navy and our allies.”
Early December saw an increase in ships docking at the Gibraltar naval base. On the 8th, Her Majesty’s Ship HMS Montrose and the Royal Auxiliary Fleet RFA Tidesurge appeared. A week earlier the British warships HMS Albion, HMS Trent and RFA had entered Mounts Bay. At the time, diplomatic negotiations for the Treaty were going through a bad time, as this newspaper reports. A spokesman for the British embassy in Madrid categorically denies any correlation between the number of ships passing over the base and these conversations.
SMALL PATROL BOATS, BIG DESTROYERS
There are jackpots and other consolation prizes for ship watchers like Sánchez. Bonus is when a nuclear submarine is sighted. “Astute nuclear powered submarine HMS Artful S121 of the Royal Navy arrives at Gibraltar naval base,” he said in a tweet on 5 June last year, accompanied by two photos of the submarine. Seeing aircraft carriers like the Prince of Wales or Queen Elisabeth is also a luxury for them. They were expected this year, but none came, he says.
It is more common to see frigates, which are naval, anti-aircraft and anti-submarine warships. One of the usual ones in the port of Gibraltar, HMS Montrose5,400 tons.
In a decision not exempt from the political debate in Spain since last year, The UK has decided to give the battleship HMS Trent a permanent base in Gibraltar.carrying out missions in the Mediterranean or the Gulf of Guinea . He spent most of that time in dry dock under repair. It is a patrol ship led by a rotating crew of up to 150 sailors. The passage of precisely these military teams into the territory of the peninsula is one of the obstacles to the Gibraltar agreement that allowed the destruction of the Gate. By tearing down that border between Spain and The Rock, the checks have to be made in the same port, and Gibraltar doesn’t want the Spanish police to be there.
LEGAL FLOW
“This flow of ships is perfectly legal because the British have left the port since the Treaty of Utrecht. [de 1715]It was when Spain left to support the British war fleet that was supposed to support merchant ships crossing the Mediterranean,” said the retired Spanish sailor El Periódico de España. liberal angel, author Gibraltar, military baseAn encyclopedia of British military installations in The Rock. On the one hand, the Royal Navy’s port of Gibraltar is a good logistical base for missions such as anti-piracy in the Gulf of Guinea because they are a thousand miles closer than when docked in the British Isles. “Sometimes they enter the port of Gibraltar. mainly to show the flag [la bandera] and make llanitos happy because the British Army is there to protect them”.
It is not these destroyers that produce the greatest tension, but the small patrol boats, HMS Cutlass and HMS Dagger. They form the Gibraltar Team. Whenever a Spanish ship (from the navy, customs, oceanographic or Civil Guard) appears in the Bay of Gibraltar, for example, bound for Algeciras, the Gibraltar Fleet leaves to “accompany” it. “Because they believe the waters around Gibraltar belong to them, they try to intimidate them,” the Liberal explains. The most normal thing is to have nothing. Spanish ships ignore them. However, they sometimes create aggressive watermarks. “Four or five years ago, there was a lot of tension when the Gibraltar Fleet struck a Spaniard from the side and it was almost a ‘tantarantán’, a blow that rocked the ship.”
With the docking of nuclear submarines there is always a diplomatic complaintas described to this paper by knowledgeable sources.
Last September, without further progress, the world’s largest nuclear submarine, American Rhode Island, docked at Gibraltar. Environmental organization Verdemar was alarmed and said “Risk for the peoples of Campo de Gibraltar and the Bosphorus”. Spain was not warned about nuclear protocols and the Navy’s activation of Environmental Radiological Surveillance Groups. There was a short pause before heading to the Black Sea, which fills the Ukrainian coast. But it came in the midst of the pulsating nuclear dialectic between Russia and the West.
“Spain and the United Kingdom are allies within NATO,” recalls this newspaper’s UK embassy spokesperson. He underlines that British warships do not only dock at Gibralita.r. Britain’s largest warship, the new aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales, docked in our country in June, when it was the flagship of the NATO High Readiness Naval Forces, to participate in the Spanish-led Flotex exercise. In the same month of December, the British Royal Auxiliary Navy hospital ship RFA Argus visited Vigo.