Well, they did it and got away with it.
Nothing much in the papers about it this afternoon, so I suppose they got away with it again. No, not much of an axe to grind to you naysayers above, just thought I'd speak up for the junior people on the ship - these sorts of things can go so very wrongly for the RN, as we have seen before in recent years and its usually the juniors who have to pay for it. Just strikes me as a risky thing to do, to send a lightly armed survey ship inshore to do a warship + marines job that's all. I speak from experience, happily now I'm a civvy I can watch from afar,from the cheap seats. If we have the "4th largest defence budget in the world", as I keep hearing, its not much of a show to achieve the result, is it?
And I'm sorry, but again, I would have thought that as a part of the planning process for a mission like this, multi-service operations staff would factor in some sort of air support if the situation had become difficult for the survey ship.
Anyway, well done the RN and others involved.