‘Gales on the Sea’

It was the last convoy was on, was coming back from Europe, it took us thirty days to cross the Atlantic. We had three gales and during those gales the convoy actually was pushed backwards. The navigating officer showman used to keep a chart on the bulletin board and everyday he'd plot where we were, so we sort of have a rough idea of what was going on. And on this particular convoy there was three times we went backwards, the storm was so severe that it pushed the whole convoy back It was an 8 knot convoy, which is, well I guess there must have been 20 knot winds or something but it was kind of funny. Thirty days before we, from the time we left Europe ‘till we got to Halifax. Interviewer: What with some of those gales what was it like to be on a corvette? They tended to roll around a fair bit. They were pretty wild, yeah. Interviewer: Describe it for me. Well you'd always have to have a hand hold on something. In rough weather they were, they were sort of a round bottom and they'd just bounce like a cork. That was their, a good thing about them, they, they didn't take a severe beating in the, from waves, because they ride the waves rather then plow through them. Where a destroyer on the other hand is so long that it breaches the waves like, and it plows through the odd one and then you got a big wave of water going over the top. But the corvette just like a cork, it was pretty rough. I've known people to sit up by the funnel all the way across the Atlantic, they wouldn't go below at all because they were sea sick.

Mr. Roberge describes what it was like to be on the sea in high wind gales.

Barney Roberge

Mr. Roberge was born in 1923, in Calgary, Alberta. He moved to Vancouver where he lived with his father until 1930. He then moved to Banff, Alberta, to live with his mother and step dad. He joined the navy as soon as war was declared. He wanted to join to see the world and to do his part in protecting the country. He talks about what it was like to be in the navy during the War.