Their ships are old, their equipment not much newer and their numbers have dwindled.

But the sailors of the South African Navy are out there.

A fleet of seven ships has been locked in "battle" during this year's Exercise Red Lion, an annual manoeuvre aimed at evaluating the navy's ability to cope under operational conditions.

This years's exercise was aimed at determining the fleet's ability to deal with and use transportable logistics support, such as mobile repair facilities.

"We are satisfied under the circumstances. We saw that our personnel can deal with a variety of situations despite the fact that their ships are old, their equipment out of date and that the navy is now much smaller," said Rear Admiral Eric Green, Flag Officer Fleet in Simon's Town.

It is Green's job to ensure that the fleet can function within the operational scope required by the defence force's joint operations command.

"We have had equipment failures, but we managed to sort them out as we would have had to under operational conditions," Green said.

"Not one of the ships that began the exercise had to return to port for repairs or retire from the exercise."

The exercise had also identified 45 people as possible members of the training crew for the first new patrol corvette before they went to Germany for final training.

Green said the corvette would arrive in Simon's Town on February 22 next year as a bare ship. Its weapons and battle systems would be installed by local contractors.

This year's exercise Red Lion involved two log support vessels, the SAS Drakensberg and the SAS Outeniqua, two strike craft, a minesweeper and a mine hunter, as well as a Daphne-class submarine.

The live firing of four missiles and two torpedos had to be put on hold due to bad weather - not because the ships were unable to deliver the weapons, but because sensitive testing equipment and analysis systems would have been unable to properly measure the results.

"The exercise also allows us to begin to build international standards into our training, so we can exercise with the best navies in the world. The German, French and Royal navies are sending ships here for what we call opportunity exercises and next year we will be sending ships to Uruguay for the regular Exercise Atlasur that we conduct with South American navies," Green said.

With acknowledgements to Henri du Plessis and Cape Argus.