HMCS Iroquois and its life in weddings, baptisms, ceremonies

HMCS Iroquois has been a flagship on NATO missions, plucked crews from sinking freighters, patrolled fishing areas off Newfoundland and chased drug traffickers in the Caribbean.

But it has a softer side, too. It's been the setting for Canadian citizenship ceremonies and 186 baptisms, while 16 people's ashes have been scattered from its deck.

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• 186 baptisms and 860,000 nautical miles: HMCS Iroquois by the numbers

And for Lt. Simon Bell, the destroyer has brought love and marriage.

It began as a chance meeting at a Starbucks in Baltimore, where Naomi Cheah was going to university. The Iroquois was in port and Bell and colleagues from the ship wanted to use the coffee shop's Wi-Fi.

He walked in, a man in uniform. Cheah asked to take a photo of his hat.

"There was a definitely a connection when the eyes first met," Bell says.

They kept in touch, dated long distance and last year decided to marry in a ceremony on board the Iroquois.

So it's with more complex feelings than many might have, that Bell considers Friday's paying off and decommissioning of the Iroquois at the Halifax Dockyard.

"It will be very strange to never be able to see again where we got married," he says. "There's the connection that I lived there so long and worked there so long. So that I will absolutely miss.

"But we won't have that spot to go back to years down the road."

'It's certainly unique'

What will be much easier to take away from the ship is the bell etched with the names of every baby that has been baptized on the Iroquois.

The bell has long been used as a font for baptisms. Turned upside down, it is filled and when the ceremony is over the water is returned to the ocean.

It's not the only bell on board. The ship's main bell is from the first Iroquois, a destroyer that fought in the Second World War and Korean War.

In 1952, when the ship came under fire, three people were killed and the original bell was damaged.

It was considered bad luck not to have a bell. But as brass was in short supply, crew collected shells used in battle and took them to Japan so a new bell could be fashioned.

That bell was retrieved before the original Iroquois was scrapped in 1966 and hangs in today's Iroquois.

"It's not a traditional naval bell, by any stretch," says Lt. Jeff Rol, who has served on the Iroquois for five years. "But it's certainly unique."