During my years at sea in the RN,RAN and MN I was only lucky enough to visit Northern Ireland twice on a ship. The first time was when I was on HMAS Sydney and we dropped anchor in Bangor this was in August 1950, and then proceeded up to Sydenham to load some new aircraft from Short&Harlands. I got five days leave and stayed with some friends in Lisburn as my family were all in Australia. The next time was in the early 60s when I was on the oil tanker "British Osprey" and werr ordered to Belfast for dry docking. We anchored in Bangor the night before and went up the Lough to Belfast the next day which turned out to be really amusing as on our way up the Lough the Pilot couldn't find one or two of the navigation buoys that marked the channel and called the PILOt HG in Carrickfergus on our short wave. We could hear the conversation which went something like this
Pilot; Am proceeding up channel on "British Osprey" I Starboard hand buoy missing also I port.
Pilot HQ. 'Ach Jasus Jimmy" Sure they were taken in for painting don't you remember?

Pilot. How the hell can I remember if nobody told me"??

Pilot HQ. "Unprintable"

Anyway we did berth at "Harland & Wolf's OK

However while we were waiting to pay off an army of custom's men were searching the ship and I mean searching,because we had just come from India and East Africa they were looking for drugs. Anyway we finally got off the ship and along with a Scots friend we got a taxi to take us up to Lisburn where I managed to persuade an aunt to put us up for a few days. "Crazy Days" Mauri