War and Peace at Longrock

War and Peace came all on the same morning at Longrock today,   Just a couple of miles south of St Michiel's Mount the new 65,000 tonnes and 280m long HMS Queen Elizebeth capable of 25 knots was conducting sea trials and practicing War Games,   The ship cost an initial £3.1Bn, was commissioned on the 7th December 2017 and expected to have a fifty year working life,

On her decks were a pair of Chinook helicopters that were assisting with the trials and three or maybe four Merlin MK2 helicopters that all took to the air during the hour that I watched the start of todays trials. They were commissioned in 2014 for force protection and anti-submarine warfare and have a lift capacity of 3.8tons,

They also track and transmit target information to the ships in their protection so I was a little concerned when one buzzed me on the shoreline while I hoped that my long lens and tripod didn't look to much like a terrorist rocket launcher !!

The size of the distant Queen Elizabeth is put into some sort of scale by the two man fishing boat that passes far closer to the camera in the image below and perhaps also the bulky Chinook helicopters dwarfed on her high deck

The 'Peace' had come a little earlier as I briefly watched  a pair of Doe Roe Deer foraging the hedgerow browse line in fields behind Longrock Pool,  I guess the War games produced the more dramatic pictures as the deer were gone from the fields before the sun broke through making good exposure a challenge but given a choice the on the right day,  I would have always stayed with the Deer !!