HMCS Robert Hampton Gray, Canada’s newest Arctic and Offshore Patrol Ship, is making a historic voyage from Halifax through the Northwest Passage to its new home with the Pacific Fleet in Esquimalt, BC. The journey will mark only the third complete Arctic transit by a Royal Canadian Navy warship and the first undertaken specifically to relocate a vessel from the Atlantic to the Pacific fleet. The deployment also marks the first time a Canadian naval vessel has operated with a Canadian Coast Guard helicopter embarked. Following a Greenland visit, the ship will conduct several weeks of surveillance, sovereignty and ice-navigation patrols in the Bering and Chukchi seas, including cooperation with the US Coast Guard, before arriving in Esquimalt and being commissioned into the Pacific Fleet in November.
