HMS Trenchant Submariners Participate at Skill At Arms

Four submariners from HMS Trenchant were among the hot shots at this year’s Plymouth and Scotland Skill At Arms shooting competition held at HMS Raleigh.

The team, consisting of Leading Engineering Technician (LET) ‘Tanzy’ Lee and Engineering Technicians (ET) Kenny Trubshaw, Damien Harris and Lewis Morgan, were all presented with their marksmanship badges in recognition of their performance during the week-long competition.

Competing against teams representing the Royal Marines, the submariners were runners-up in two of the categories and third in another, despite rarely using weapons in their day jobs on the submarine.

LET Lee said: “We all specialise in marine engineering and in our jobs we don’t really touch weapons at all, so when we got the opportunity to come across to Raleigh we all jumped at the chance.

The Plymouth and Scotland Skill At Arms event is held over five days with each competitor having to complete their annual combat marksmanship test at the start of the competition.

Six teams took part this year representing HMS Trenchant, HMS Sutherland, the Commando Training Centre Lympstone, 42 Commando, 1 Assault Group Royal Marines and HMS Raleigh’s Military Training Unit (MTU).

The annual Skill-At-Arms meeting is a pre-cursor to the Inter-Service competition at Bisley and allows the Royal Navy to select a team of 15 to compete at what is the pinnacle of the Armed Forces competition shooting calendar.

The MTU at HMS Raleigh provides cutting edge weapons training for Naval Service personnel at all levels, ensuring that they are fully prepared to protect themselves or their units on operations at sea and ashore.

The unit has the most up-to-date facilities available to the Royal Navy, including computer simulators, outside ranges and multimedia classrooms.

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Press Release, June 12, 2014; Image: UK Navy