I must say, the coastal defense ship in camo just became my favorite image of the AAR so far. Silly question but since this is the first time I've seen such effort to keep a ship hidden, was this sort of method common?
It was standard practice if the ship was staying in one place in the archipelago for a longer time, camouflaging stationary ship made sense since the waters of Arcipelago Sea were littered with thousands of islands:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3128/2636092980_1488e6da67.jpg
In fact they still do it with, even though the camouflaging is made primarily with IR netting:
http://tietokannat.mil.fi/aalto2004/include/thumbnail.php?id=89&width=640