Bacchante gets a mention - here's a small snippet:

For two weeks in mid summer, I was temporarily drafted to H.M.S. Baccante (known as the Bagshanty) which was designated as Guard Ship for Cowes Week that year. I was enlisted as boats crew, meaning we had to run between Portsmouth and Cowes over the sandbanks to fetch/return crew/stores, then at night we would graciously ferry yacht crews from wardroom - sorry - ship to yacht, or back, taking great care to avoid causing a wake enough to rock the sleeping yachts and their crews. Not that we’d do that of course. Unless provoked by lets say - not getting a tip. Those weeks passed quickly, and it was soon back to barracks. Many years later, while touring H.M.S. Victory (the REAL one) with my wife and some friends, I met the man who I crewed with , a chap called Simon Battisby - we recognised each other immediately, which dredged up all kinds of memories. 

A burning memory from that duty, was the cutter we ran, which could hold dozens of passengers rather than the several we used to carry with our whalers, was equipped with bucket gear. This is an old, cheap way of ensuring you don’t have to fit a reverse gear on the engine. The bucket was controlled by a handle you used to wank round, rapidly, which closed a bucket behind the propeller, forcing the wash back the other way, meaning the boat theoretically started to go backwards, assuming you remembered to rev up the engine to full power first to counteract the forward momentum. Except that it all took longer than it takes to read about it, and when you suddenly find you have to go backwards, hurriedly, it is easier to just to hang on for dear life, and go through the motions, so when you finally smash in to whatever it was you were heading for, you can at least swear blind you were doing your best. The cutter was extremely well built - much harder than anything it bounced off.

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