The Royal Navy warship, HMS Severn has just completed Tradewinds 15, a 14 nation training exercise in the Caribbean.
Ships and personnel participated from Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, Canada, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Jamaica, St Kitts and Nevis, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, the USA and Severn from the UK.
Organisers set their goals as improving the ability of the many nations to carry out a combined operation, responding to natural disasters and dealing with organised crime – two reasons why Severn is in the Caribbean.
The exercise was split between the waters around the tiny nation of St Kitts and Nevis, then shifted 1,700 miles to the west to the base of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula.
Throughout her part in the exercise, Severn had six Belizean Coast Guard officers embarked to develop relationships between the two countries.
And at times, the patrol ship also found herself hosting personnel from the other nations taking part in the exercise.
Lieutenant Commander Aceion Prescott of the Jamaican Defence Force-Coast Guard said the experience of exercising alongside more than a dozen other nations was invaluable.
For Severn, Tradewinds came on the back of a four-day visit to Ocho Rios on the north coast of Jamaica where members of the Jamaica Defence Force Regiment went onboard for a tour.
Severn is now approaching the end of her inaugural Caribbean deployment – like the rest of the first batch of the River class she spent the first decade of her RN career in European waters helping to maintain fishing stocks.
She is due back in Portsmouth later in July having visited more than 20 countries’s due back in Portsmouth in the middle of this month having visited more than 20 countries since arriving in the Caribbean in late 2014.
Image: US Navy