84 CHALLENGER 



Trinity House vessel Patricia, as the two ships worked together 

 to mark the narrow sea-lanes of the east coast, which were to 

 be more permanently marked by the upperworks, funnels and 

 masts of the many vessels which were mined and torpedoed when 

 these lanes became so appropriately named 'E Boat Alley'. 



By the end of September Challenger's work on the war channels 

 was complete and she was at Sheerness carrying out tidal stream 

 surveys in the Thames Estuary. At this point Commander Baker 

 exchanged duties with Commander W. C. Jenks, who had been 

 in command of the surveying ship Scott, now being fitted with 

 a 4-inch gun and depth charges to become an escort vessel. 



Commander Jenks was a man to whom surveying was more than 

 his job, it was his whole life. He was a man of stern appearance 

 and a hard man to cross. If he expected his ship's company to 

 work 1 8 hours a day, then he himself would work 20, and those 

 are the hours that, in fact, he worked during war-time sur- 

 veying. 



With the coming of the War a number of bases and fleet 

 anchorages were being opened up and protected by the laying of 

 booms across the harbour entrances. There was much surveying 

 work to be done at such places ; large-scale charts of the anchor- 

 ages were required ; the accurate positioning of the booms and 

 the boom gate vessels required triangulated points ashore and 

 an exact knowledge of the depth of water where these booms were 

 laid; tidal streams had to be measured where these were to be 

 placed ; range finder testing charts required the accurate fixing 

 of the prominent marks onshore ; there were a hundred and one 

 odds and ends of survey work to be done at these ports and 

 anchorajres in the early days of the War and the programme was 

 delayed by the necessity of sailing in convoy between one port 

 and the next. 



It was not until the end of October that there was found time 

 to fit Challenger with any armament at all, although on a number 

 of occasions low-flying enemy aircraft had been sighted by the 

 ship while working in the Thames Estuary. Two Lewis guns were 

 all that were fitted and this delayed her sailing in convoy from 

 Sheerness to Plymouth, but she was able to overtake the convoy 

 before it reached Dungeness at 10 o'clock at night. Challenger 



