Navy sailors perform ‘ballet with ships’ near Victoria

Roughly 150 Royal Canadian Navy sailors took to the waters off Victoria on Wednesday to practise maneuvering their vessels within close quarters of each other.

“It’s sort of like doing ballet with ships at sea basically, but there’s a lot more math involved,” A/SLt. Ben Roth said.

The exercise marked the first time all eight of the Orca-class patrol vessels slipped off to sea together. The Orcas went into service between 2006 and 2008 and typically, at least one of the vessels is out of commission for maintenance or repairs.

“The engineering department has been working pretty much day and night for the past couple of weeks trying to get everything set up and get all those ships on the water,” naval warfare officer Lt. Jeremy Morissette said.

A CTV News reporter was on board one of the vessels to capture the action. Watch the full story above.