Once on The G.C. Marshall we were pulling into port, knowing that the river was not dredged deep enough for our normal draft. Most of the river was dredged deep enough, but there was one spot in particular were it is kind of shallow. So we timed our trip to happen during the extra-high high-tide, and while coming in we maintained the air-blow into the main-ballast tanks to try and keep us riding just a little higher in the water than we normally ride. Subs don’t turn on a dime so we don’t normally travel real fast when in restrictive waters, but in this case we did run a full-bell as we hoped that if we did drag on the bottom we would have enough inertia to push us over the shallow spot. We did hit, and our inertia did carry us forward. It happens.
Sometimes while out to sea, the Navigator will lay out the track ahead of time, maybe for weeks ahead of time. The Quartermaster on watch will pull out the next set of charts as we come to the edge of the paper. Usually a track might be 20 miles wide and the on-watch OOD has the 'freedom' to operate anywhere within that track, so long as he does not allow the boat to get behind it's projected PIM. If the quartermaster does not fully read and examine each chart as he lays them out, he may miss noted that the Navigator has put on them, saying that our maximum operating depth needs to be raised until we pass a certain point. So because we were operating at one depth for the past week without any problems, when we traverse onto the next chart, we might not come up to an appropriate depth to clear all sea-mounts on the next chart. Bump.
On fast-attacks they don’t really keep as close attention to their position as we do on boomers. They go out to sea and so long as they can find the next port when they are ready to, they don’t really need to know exactly where they are to any precise degree. Come up to PD (periscope depth) 40 miles from land and start looking for navigational beacons, to figure out where you are, before lining up to surface and pull into port. But looking through fog and waves, you don’t really see everything, so you hope you are one place and that directly South is beacon number 34, but what if it is really beacon number 36? You plot the boat as passing beacon 34, and everyone gets ready to turn [thinking that the beacon is a channel marker showing a dredged channel, whereas in reality it is a buoy marking shoals. The boat turns a mile early and drives straight into shoal rocks. Bump, crunch, scrape …
Every time a boat surfaces it is at extreme hazard. Our sonar systems work reasonably well horizontally within each thermal-layer, but trying to ‘look’ up is only possibly within your layer. So when we go up to the surface you can not know if anyone is above us. Looking up through the periscope we may see shapes or shadows from surface ships, but clouds, rain squalls and fog-banks make them also. Which is why boats surface underneath air-craft carriers and tankers.
Imagine building a steel room; outside you mount a propulsion system so the room can travel around, but you don’t build any windows. Now lock yourself inside and drive around. Now find the spot where you started, go back there and park.
Todays newspaper has an article blaming 'outdated' charts. The "National Geo-Spactial-Intelligence Agency" said that older 'NAVOCEANO' charts did not show any obstacle in the area where the USS San Fransisco was working. Apparantly their new-whizz-bang charts do show stuff.
We commonly did 'find' things that where not on the charts, mountains and what-not. Unfortunately because of the secrecy of the community, where we go, and what we do; much of that information has not been traditionally shared with the map makers.
Many areas where we noramally operate, we find things and share them among the sub-community, but it stays there, and is not used to update the surface-community's charts. They are kind of left on their own to map things.
On the other hand, what does a surface ship need with detailed charts showing sea mounts. If your keel draft is 75 feet, then what lays at 400+ feet is beyond your area of concern. Super-tankers with drafts down to 150 feet are more concerned, but again their area of concern kind of stops at 150 feet.
I have been present to chart numerous sea mounts that were in areas where we operated repeatedly. They move. They grow. They change. If we are tracking our own position by watching the contours of the ocean bottom beneath us, and that bottom contour changes, we notice. Ideally these changes are rarely close enough to us that us bump into them. But not always.
Most unique 'features' that we use to navigate by, have been used by many subs. We annotate their global movement, so that each time we pass over one we can update it's position and thus update our own position as we pass by. Anytime a 'feature' is noted as changing it's movement patterns in any way, we stop using it and notify the rest of the sub fleet to stop using that 'feature' as well.
It is just un-fortunate when anyone bumps into one.
The Navy reported that the sub grounded about 350 miles south of Guam. Here is a MAP of that area. That would place the sub grounding some where in the Caroline Islands of Micronesia. That would be a relatively shallow area since the islands run east to west. The latest is that it may have been poor charts but I have a feeling that this has effectively ended the careers of several officers on the boat- starting with the captain,
Here is a BLOG blog reference to the grounding that has some info on the accident
There is only two kinds of vessels on that ocean my friend. There are Submarines and there are targets. While in civilian attire I commonly wear T-shirts with that slogan and I have for many years.
:-)
During WWII over 90% of all sunken tonnage was sunk by the 'Silent Service’, which at the time accounted for less than 1% of the Navy. In the most recent one hundred years ‘boats’ have done more for maintaining open lanes of sea-going traffic and commerce than anyone’s surface targets.
That's funny.. my naval friend says that too, and he was stationed on a couple of subs. He reminisces about the food. Navy chefs really trained by the best in the art, plus almost anything he could eat. I think he would rather forget what it was like being on one of the old fossil fuel powered jobs. Really liked being on one of the nukes.
quote:Come up to PD (periscope depth) 40 miles from land and start looking for navigational beacons, to figure out where you are, before lining up to surface and pull into port. But looking through fog and waves, you don’t really see everything, so you hope you are one place and that directly South is beacon number 34, but what if it is really beacon number 36? You plot the boat as passing beacon 34, and everyone gets ready to turn [thinking that the beacon is a channel marker showing a dredged channel, whereas in reality it is a buoy marking shoals. The boat turns a mile early and drives straight into shoal rocks. Bump, crunch, scrape …
I have been navigating boats since long before GPS was invented. Or should I say swiped from the USSR [see Glonass systems for the original GPS system].
Military-Spec GPS units are huge, water-cooled and have a warm-up time in just under an hour.
1. If you start it without any information, it must 'listen' for brds to fly overhead to begin gathering time ticks, after the first 6 birds have flown by then, and only then will it start to formulate a position fix. Pier-side I have watched these units take greater than 6 hours and still not be capable of deriving a fix.
2. If you knew where you were before you raised the antenna, you can enter it, then locking-on to obtain a fix will be fairly quick . If your position you entered before coming to PD is 'off'. 'off' like 0.1 NM off, then the GPS unit will just sit there looking at you. It can not define a fix. And it will not define a fix, as it gets 'stuck' in a loop.
Of the boats I have served on, only one had a GPS unit installed. Sometimes the officers would purchase their own land-held GPS and sneak it in their pocket. As we were surfaced and heading into port, via a shipping lane, the bridge look-outs could easily see that we were about centered in the shipping lane, as we are passing buoys to either side, and land is visible to port and to starboard; the officers are supposed to be up in the conning tower watching for surface traffic for us to avoid, they would commonly play with their un-authorized GPS unit and call us with what they thought should be 'good' fixes. Plotting their GPS fixes on our charts could place us ashore, or in the on-coming traffic lane, or even back out to sea again.
GPS is another tool. It can be a good tool. However they do not replace the rest of the toolbox. They are not the best tool in the box. Nor are they as reliable as we would wish.
Periscope Masts do have a GPS antenna as they do also have a NavSat capability [which is far better], but when it comes to entering port nothing compares to 'seeing' with my own eyes the light-houses on either side of the river and verifying that we are in the shipping channel myself.
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WhiteDove
Galen
Any ideas how something like this could happen? Seems odd to me. And do we reeeeeally want these people having nuclear weapons?
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Galen
Sure it happens.
Once on The G.C. Marshall we were pulling into port, knowing that the river was not dredged deep enough for our normal draft. Most of the river was dredged deep enough, but there was one spot in particular were it is kind of shallow. So we timed our trip to happen during the extra-high high-tide, and while coming in we maintained the air-blow into the main-ballast tanks to try and keep us riding just a little higher in the water than we normally ride. Subs don’t turn on a dime so we don’t normally travel real fast when in restrictive waters, but in this case we did run a full-bell as we hoped that if we did drag on the bottom we would have enough inertia to push us over the shallow spot. We did hit, and our inertia did carry us forward. It happens.
Sometimes while out to sea, the Navigator will lay out the track ahead of time, maybe for weeks ahead of time. The Quartermaster on watch will pull out the next set of charts as we come to the edge of the paper. Usually a track might be 20 miles wide and the on-watch OOD has the 'freedom' to operate anywhere within that track, so long as he does not allow the boat to get behind it's projected PIM. If the quartermaster does not fully read and examine each chart as he lays them out, he may miss noted that the Navigator has put on them, saying that our maximum operating depth needs to be raised until we pass a certain point. So because we were operating at one depth for the past week without any problems, when we traverse onto the next chart, we might not come up to an appropriate depth to clear all sea-mounts on the next chart. Bump.
On fast-attacks they don’t really keep as close attention to their position as we do on boomers. They go out to sea and so long as they can find the next port when they are ready to, they don’t really need to know exactly where they are to any precise degree. Come up to PD (periscope depth) 40 miles from land and start looking for navigational beacons, to figure out where you are, before lining up to surface and pull into port. But looking through fog and waves, you don’t really see everything, so you hope you are one place and that directly South is beacon number 34, but what if it is really beacon number 36? You plot the boat as passing beacon 34, and everyone gets ready to turn [thinking that the beacon is a channel marker showing a dredged channel, whereas in reality it is a buoy marking shoals. The boat turns a mile early and drives straight into shoal rocks. Bump, crunch, scrape …
Every time a boat surfaces it is at extreme hazard. Our sonar systems work reasonably well horizontally within each thermal-layer, but trying to ‘look’ up is only possibly within your layer. So when we go up to the surface you can not know if anyone is above us. Looking up through the periscope we may see shapes or shadows from surface ships, but clouds, rain squalls and fog-banks make them also. Which is why boats surface underneath air-craft carriers and tankers.
Imagine building a steel room; outside you mount a propulsion system so the room can travel around, but you don’t build any windows. Now lock yourself inside and drive around. Now find the spot where you started, go back there and park.
:-)
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Galen
Todays newspaper has an article blaming 'outdated' charts. The "National Geo-Spactial-Intelligence Agency" said that older 'NAVOCEANO' charts did not show any obstacle in the area where the USS San Fransisco was working. Apparantly their new-whizz-bang charts do show stuff.
We commonly did 'find' things that where not on the charts, mountains and what-not. Unfortunately because of the secrecy of the community, where we go, and what we do; much of that information has not been traditionally shared with the map makers.
Many areas where we noramally operate, we find things and share them among the sub-community, but it stays there, and is not used to update the surface-community's charts. They are kind of left on their own to map things.
On the other hand, what does a surface ship need with detailed charts showing sea mounts. If your keel draft is 75 feet, then what lays at 400+ feet is beyond your area of concern. Super-tankers with drafts down to 150 feet are more concerned, but again their area of concern kind of stops at 150 feet.
I have been present to chart numerous sea mounts that were in areas where we operated repeatedly. They move. They grow. They change. If we are tracking our own position by watching the contours of the ocean bottom beneath us, and that bottom contour changes, we notice. Ideally these changes are rarely close enough to us that us bump into them. But not always.
Most unique 'features' that we use to navigate by, have been used by many subs. We annotate their global movement, so that each time we pass over one we can update it's position and thus update our own position as we pass by. Anytime a 'feature' is noted as changing it's movement patterns in any way, we stop using it and notify the rest of the sub fleet to stop using that 'feature' as well.
It is just un-fortunate when anyone bumps into one.
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ckeer
The Navy reported that the sub grounded about 350 miles south of Guam. Here is a MAP of that area. That would place the sub grounding some where in the Caroline Islands of Micronesia. That would be a relatively shallow area since the islands run east to west. The latest is that it may have been poor charts but I have a feeling that this has effectively ended the careers of several officers on the boat- starting with the captain,
Here is a BLOG blog reference to the grounding that has some info on the accident
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Ham
Galen, a friend of mine insists that the Navy does not have boats, but ships. Run one aground, and you can call it anything you want..
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Galen
Hammeroni:
There is only two kinds of vessels on that ocean my friend. There are Submarines and there are targets. While in civilian attire I commonly wear T-shirts with that slogan and I have for many years.
:-)
During WWII over 90% of all sunken tonnage was sunk by the 'Silent Service’, which at the time accounted for less than 1% of the Navy. In the most recent one hundred years ‘boats’ have done more for maintaining open lanes of sea-going traffic and commerce than anyone’s surface targets.
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Ham
That's funny.. my naval friend says that too, and he was stationed on a couple of subs. He reminisces about the food. Navy chefs really trained by the best in the art, plus almost anything he could eat. I think he would rather forget what it was like being on one of the old fossil fuel powered jobs. Really liked being on one of the nukes.
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Galen
Best food on the planet.
Just dont expect fresh milk, lettuce, eggs [they just dont last very long], not after the first month.
:-)
It always amazed me how many Bubble-head cooks all ask for either: Ice-Carving or Sauce-Chef for their advanced training in San Fransisco.
On the other hand getting you choice of 100lb ice carvings for your birthday dinner, or any special sauces that you may prefer.
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Jim
No GPS antenna on the periscope mast?
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Ham
Yep Galen.. my friend described the frenzy on deck as the sailors warfed down gallons of fresh milk..
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Galen
Jim:
"No GPS antenna on the periscope mast?"
I have been navigating boats since long before GPS was invented. Or should I say swiped from the USSR [see Glonass systems for the original GPS system].
Military-Spec GPS units are huge, water-cooled and have a warm-up time in just under an hour.
1. If you start it without any information, it must 'listen' for brds to fly overhead to begin gathering time ticks, after the first 6 birds have flown by then, and only then will it start to formulate a position fix. Pier-side I have watched these units take greater than 6 hours and still not be capable of deriving a fix.
2. If you knew where you were before you raised the antenna, you can enter it, then locking-on to obtain a fix will be fairly quick . If your position you entered before coming to PD is 'off'. 'off' like 0.1 NM off, then the GPS unit will just sit there looking at you. It can not define a fix. And it will not define a fix, as it gets 'stuck' in a loop.
Of the boats I have served on, only one had a GPS unit installed. Sometimes the officers would purchase their own land-held GPS and sneak it in their pocket. As we were surfaced and heading into port, via a shipping lane, the bridge look-outs could easily see that we were about centered in the shipping lane, as we are passing buoys to either side, and land is visible to port and to starboard; the officers are supposed to be up in the conning tower watching for surface traffic for us to avoid, they would commonly play with their un-authorized GPS unit and call us with what they thought should be 'good' fixes. Plotting their GPS fixes on our charts could place us ashore, or in the on-coming traffic lane, or even back out to sea again.
GPS is another tool. It can be a good tool. However they do not replace the rest of the toolbox. They are not the best tool in the box. Nor are they as reliable as we would wish.
Periscope Masts do have a GPS antenna as they do also have a NavSat capability [which is far better], but when it comes to entering port nothing compares to 'seeing' with my own eyes the light-houses on either side of the river and verifying that we are in the shipping channel myself.
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