The point I was trying to make with that anecdote is that after discovering that I was just as competent as anybody else trying to run the reactor and “just as competent” meant that everyone was pretty much faking it, the wool was pulled off my eyes and I realized a large chunk of what we did was just dumb. One time I was in the midst of a reactor repair and it would take a lot of context to explain fully but a guy hit the wrong menu item on a laptop and I think re-downloaded some data instead of saving it, or something. This affected nothing and the obvious solution was just to hit like “save” again but we couldn’t do it because it wasn’t in the procedure and so I had to sit there and stare at this dude, and we had both been on watch for like 14 hours at this point, and were very sleep deprived, while the other nuclear people went off and had a very serious discussion over whether we could hit “save” on this stupid little laptop because that was the obvious answer but it wasn’t written in the procedure so we weren’t sure if we would be smited by the nuclear gods if we did this, and look it was all really really stupid and in nuclear power you had to pretend like it wasn’t and I was fed up with it all. I requested to be de-nuked actually. I have a whole other set of stories about how nuclear qualification testing worked, but honestly I’m not going to get into that. If you haven’t caught on the whole schtick of these current set of blog posts is to tell the most meandering sea story possible so I can catch up on over a month’s worth of posts, but going into nuclear qualification testing is a bit too much. I gotta save something for later.

So anyway. Finally. My one decent sea story. Look, it’s going to start off nuke-y which I’ve said is bad but bear with me for a bit. We did an emergency reactor shutdown at sea and I’m not entirely sure why. My impression was that we didn’t really need to but it was the current hip thing to do in the submarine force so we did it. What started this whole thing off was an intentional shutdown. Sort of. A scram drill. A scram drill wasn’t that big of a deal, or at least it isn’t supposed to be. A down-and-up, they’re called. In a simple scram drill you throw the scram switch, half the rods go down, and this shuts down the reactor though the reactor barely notices. I knew they were going to do a down-and-up drill on the watch before my watch, so when I woke up there were 1MCs (ship-wide announcements) about a scram but despite the fact you are supposed to listen to 1MCs I just entirely ignored them. I just went about my wake-up routine, such as going to the bathroom and taking a shower. I was only supposed to stand contact manager that watch, which is a really easy job out there in the middle of the Philippine Sea where you will get like one contact a watch, maybe, and it will be a distant merchant ship, and so all you do is just stand there, so there wasn’t a need for a robust pre-watch tour. So there I was in a little la-la land of my own making when I finally wandered up to the bridge and realized everything was on fire. Luckily, only metaphorically. Our down-and-up drill had just turned into “down” because when they inserted the scram something or other went wrong. I’m not sure what, as I’ve reiterated, but it meant we had to do an emergency reactor shutdown. Look, I know what you’re saying, we had a scram in so the reactor was already shut down, this is true, but we shut it down more. There are procedures and stuff. Maybe some valves? I dunno, it’s been a while. What was going on with the reactor was only relevant to me because the submarine was at periscope depth and people were panicking. If the reactor is going to be shut down for a while you have to start up the diesel so you can continue to run important stuff like reactor coolant pumps with keep the reactor cool, and ventilation fans and ballast pumps which keep us from dying. And just about the time I wandered up to the bridge they were trying to start the diesel and it wasn’t starting. Uh oh! The guy who was supposed to stand OOD was the guy who was in charge of the diesel, so he had to run off to try to fix that so we didn’t die or whatever. That left me the person in charge, and I had barely thought I would need to stay conscious this watch. I tried to evaluate what was going on, watch-wise, which was mostly AHHH EVERYTHING IS BAD AHHH, and then I went down for the pre-watch brief. We normally did the pre-watch brief in the wardroom, but that was full of people trying to figure out how to reverse course on the whole AHHH EVERYTHING IS BAD AHHH thing, and plus half the watchsection, including the OOD, was off trying to fix the problem, so that left me and a small gaggle of the leftover watchstanders in athwartships, the most out-of-the-way place we could muster, with me trying to lead a pre-watch brief. Just to finish painting the picture in my memory it must have been night or something and so all the lights were red and various slightly panicked 1MCs were being announced so it was confusion. And the pre-watch brief consisted I think pretty much literally of me saying: “Well, uh, we are at periscope depth and the reactor is shut down. We might surface, or we might not, who knows, so, um, be prepared for that. Any questions?” There were no questions. We gobbled down some I think olives and pudding (i.e. things out of cans because there was no power to cook with) and head up to watch.

To be continued…