In 1962 he entered the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, where he became coxswain as the captain of the college’s fast motorboat, and learnt a love of precise seamanship which endured throughout his naval career and extended to family canal boat holidays.

Inskip qualified as a ship’s diver while in the destroyer Cambrian in 1966, and, unusually, retained his qualification throughout his 30-year naval career, recording an extraordinary 30,000 minutes in his diving log.

In 1968 he became a submariner, serving in the diesel-driven boats Onslaught, Sealion, Odin, and Onyx, where he particularly enjoyed the challenge of navigation in the Far East without radar, becoming – before the days of GPS – an astronavigation expert, using hand-held and artificial horizon periscope sextants.

Promoted to lieutenant-commander in 1975, Inskip reached “dagger N”, the highest level of navigating expertise in the Royal Navy in 1979. He celebrated by bringing his ship, the frigate Apollo, into the confined Mevagissey harbour and startling bystanders in the quay by playfully asking: “Where are we?”

He was appointed flotilla navigation officer in Glamorgan in 1980. One of his successes came during an exercise in the Arabian Sea when, by disguising the ship’s electronic signature and her lights, he closed undetected to within firing range on a US carrier battlegroup.

After the Falklands, Inskip served (1982-97) in a series of key training and planning and security roles before retiring to Cornwall. There he lectured on health and safety at Cornwall College Business School, and rented out self-catering holiday homes at Croft Farm. He also served as a governor of Goonhavern primary school and as a Crantock parish councillor, and was a keen competitor at the Goonhavern Horticultural Show.

Inskip wrote Ordeal by Exocet – HMS Glamorgan and the Falklands War 1982 (2002, reissued 2012), one of the best books about war at sea in the age of the missile. He drew on his contemporary journal plus four other diaries and the letters of his shipmates, to create a moving portrayal of the daily life of a destroyer in modern war. Inskip, as a master storyteller, contrasted the gruesome realities of war with glimpses of what the families and friends were doing at home.

Inskip was much in demand to talk about his Falklands experience, but all fees and the profits from book sales were donated to charities, including Combat Stress, the Falkland Islands Memorial Chapel, and the HMS Glamorgan memorial which was erected at Hookers Point in the Falkland Islands in 2011.

Later Inskip was the Royal British Legion’s county events officer and the Poppy Appeal organiser for the Perranporth Area (2007-12), tripling the monies raised.

Inskip was a family man and though of few words, he had a strong sense of duty, a competitive nature, and a wicked sense of humour. When he died he was working on a 6 ft model of Glamorgan.

Inskip married Marianne Petersen in 1975; she survives him with their two daughters, one of whom, inspired by her father, is an astrophysicist.

Cdr Ian Inskip, born November 2 1943, died June 24 2016