The Former British Warship Helping To Clear Thousands Of Mines

A former British warship is helping to clear thousands of mines from the Baltic Sea.

HMS Sandown was a Royal Navy minehunter, but she was sold to the Estonian Navy ten years ago.

Renamed the Admiral Cowan, along with two of her sister ships, she’s still playing an important role in NATO.

Compared to most of its NATO allies, the Estonian Navy is tiny which has just five ships, which can sit comfortably alongside the jetty of the country’s main naval base.

Three of these ships used to be British Royal Navy ships, sold off to the Estonian navy in 2007.

The flagship of the Estonian fleet, formerly HMS Sandown, has been renamed the Admiral Cowan, after a British officer who helped Estonia win its independence from Russia in 1918.

All three of these former Royal Navy ships are minehunters.

They were the first British warships to be designed by computer, and were considered hi-tech when they came into service in the late 1980s.

Thirty years later, with some modernisation to the navigation systems and sonar, they’re still going strong.

Estonia needs good ships to help clear the 40,000 mines that litter the Baltic sea around its 1700Km coastline.  

The mines are a legacy of two world wars and half a century of Soviet occupation.  

Towards the end of last year, tensions increased in this region when Russia installed radar and weaponry on its own strip of Baltic coast, including anti-shipping missiles.

Sea mines are a threat which still exists in modern warfare.

With just five ships and two hundred and fifty people, Estonia depends on NATO for its maritime firepower.  

In return, Estonia sends a minehunter to join one of NATO’s mine-countermeasure groups, patrolling the seas of northern Europe. 

The Estonian Navy may be small, but it has the full weight of NATO behind it.