When we did it at Mountbatten we all clambered into a six man liferaft of the type carried in the Victor and closed it up. By the time the Whirlwind arrived all five of us had been sick - one of only two occasions in my life when I have had motion sickness (the other was in an armoured personnel carrier).
By the next time I did sea drills it had been sensibly decided that no-one was ever going to ditch a Victor, so the multi seat liferaft had been removed. After being chucked off the back of the launch we all got into our individual liferafts, and within a short time one of our number started to drift away downwind. When the Whirlwind arrived, he was the first to be picked up, and he told us afterwards that by hauling in the sea anchor on his dinghy he would drift downwind and thus spend less time bobbing around in the oggin.
At Kai Tak there was always a movement towards towards the open air pool when the Cathay Pacific hostesses (as they were then called) came to do their drills. I went once, but disappointingly the girls all wore jeans and jumpers for the exercise
