SASKATOON – HMCS Unicorn may seem out of place. The navy facility is located in the middle of the Prairies, over a thousand kilometres from the Pacific Ocean. So it begs the question; what exactly goes on inside?
“As a naval reserve division we are primarily here to train part time sailors,” said HMCS Unicorn commanding officer, Lt.-Cmdr. Matthew Dalzell.
Sailors like leading seaman Aran Nurnberger, who joined the navy when he was seventeen and toured on the HMCS Yellowknife.
“Honestly I love that you can work with your hands, you can get outside and it’s not the same everyday,” said Nurnberger.
Nurnberger worked on Operation Caribbe, an anti-drug trafficking deployment in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean.
HMCS Saskatoon was a partner in the operation, which ended April 20. During the operation almost 2,000 kilograms of cocaine was seized over forty-eight days.
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For Dalzell, a third-generation sailor, nothing compared to being a ‘prairie sailor’. He is the 26th commanding officer of HMCS Unicorn; his father was the 19th.
“It’s been a really great experience, I’ve learnt a lot and been able to do a lot of things that you don’t get to do any other way,” said Dalzell.
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HMCS Unicorn was established in 1923 and named after one of the first ships to travel into Hudson Bay looking for the Northwest Passage.
“Since that time we’ve actually been in three locations. This is our third location built in 1943 primarily as a training establishment for people joining the Royal Canadian Navy during the war,” said Dalzell.
During the Battle of the Atlantic in the Second World War, 3,600 people were recruited to the navy and trained at HMCS Unicorn. Now about a dozen recruits are trained each year in basic rope and boat work, which includes simulators and computer based training.
“We don’t often think of the navy because we don’t see it. But as a place with an import and an export economy we depend on getting things we grow or dig out of the ground to other markets. Most of that is by sea and of course we depend on a lot of things coming from overseas to us.”
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