Areas of Responsibility with Sea Training Pacific

When I was with HMCS Huron, Sea Training Pacific, what they do is they come on board pretty well every year and they work up, it’s called work ups. They work up the crew and train them to be able to fight fires, floods, we simulate a crash on deck. It’s basically Sea Training tests the ability of the crew in different, difficult situations to make sure that they are ready to deploy so when I worked with Sea Training we went on board all the ships. Workups would consist of about usually about four weeks of training so the first two weeks we would start off slowly doing exercises like man overboard, you know, boarding party exercises. Stuff that was relevant to the taskings that they were going to see when they went over to the operational area so what we would normally do is we would get on this ship in Esquimalt and we would work them up with the Americans. We had air craft. We had other ships involved and we would head to make our way to Hawaii, spend a couple of weeks at sea and then we would come off the ship, give the crew a bit of a break because they needed it after that. Then we would get back on board the ship a couple of days later and we’d basically give them the full Monty as you could say. We would start working them up slowly doing simulated fire exercises in different parts of the ship and then it would be like an exercise where, you know, there would be incoming missiles. The ship would be attacked in different areas so on board the ship different section bases would have to close up in certain areas in order to save the ship so it was basically by the end of our, by the last week we would just give them everything and along with that there would be simulated casualties, you know, so it touched all parts of the ship. And our crew and our people received training. They would monitor each of the different sections and all that. And then we would do a critique on how the ship did, if they did well or if they didn’t do well. So we would have to write up a critique after every exercise and then let them know how they were doing.

Ms. Bate provides details on the roles and responsibilities on board ship as part of the Sea Training Pacific team.

Sandy Bate

Ms. Sandy Bate was born July 11, 1960 in Chatham, New Brunswick. Prior to joining the military, she was employed with DND for ten years. At the age of 28 she chose to join the military and with her clerical skills and sports background saw fit to join the air force. Throughout Ms. Bate’s career she had several postings across Canada and because of family connection in Comox, BC made a big decision to switch over to the navy as junior clerk and become part of the crew of the HMCS Huron. Eventually, due to declining health, Ms. Bate was medically discharged in 2009. Being part of the Invictus Games 2017 has been instrumental in providing a positive outlook to her retired life. She represented Canada as part of the Team Canada Golf team, an initiative she is most proud of. Ms. Bate now resides in Victoria, BC with her family.