A CREDITON Royal Navy veteran has self-published his second memoir.

Phil Carroll’s first volume, Under a Big Blue Star: Exotic Voyages of a Deck Cadet, was released in 2023 and focuses on his four years’ service with the Merchant Navy in the early 1980s.

It features reminiscences of steaming around the world on cargo ships and is interspersed with descriptions of life at sea on trans-ocean voyages, coastal passages between ports, working cargo in port and work on deck at sea.

It also details the decline of the British merchant fleet and the introduction of containerisation.

Mr Carroll’s second book, White Hull, Buff Funnel: A Personal Voyage from Dartmouth to Deep Ocean, has just been published.

It describes his time in the Royal Navy, training at Britannia Royal Naval College Dartmouth, in the fleet and as a Probationary Hydrographic Survey Officer.

“After Basic Hydrographic Course at RN Hydrographic School, HMS Drake, I was unleashed into surveying on the UK continental shelf and on seven- or eight-month deployments to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans,” Mr Carroll said.

“In the middle of this sea-going life, I was fortunate to return to BRNC as a Divisional Officer, converting spotty adolescents and grumpy graduates into naval officers.

“The 1980s and 1990s were the RN Hydrographic Survey Squadron’s golden era as well as shifts in technology, equipment and systems from the analogue to the digital age where data is now hoovered up in immense volumes.”

Life at sea and ashore is again described, and illustrated with a variety of photos.

Under A Big Blue Star: Exotic Voyages of a Deck Cadet and White Hull, Buff Funnel: A Personal Voyage from Dartmouth to Deep Ocean are both available in print and in e-book format from Amazon, Kobo and other online booksellers.

They have been published by Shakspeare Editorial, which is based in Sandford.