As another side note, a buddy of mine one time met someone who worked in Hollywood or something. This person told my friend that he knew some guys and maybe if he worked something up he could pitch a submarine TV show to some people. The greatest submarine TV show is of course Last Resort, but it was fun to imagine alternatives. My buddy turned to me to help out with ideas, and the two I remember were doing an episode a la Waiting… where a new Ensign shows up and can’t get a word in edgewise all day as he is shuffled around from misadventure to misadventure, and my other idea was basically my experience here where a dude wanders around oblivious to the obvious crisis going on around him because he just woke up and had expected drills anyways. Of course this TV show never got pitched let alone made, but knowing someone who knows someone and saying that maybe something could get pitched seemed like a very Hollywood experience if not the quintessential Hollywood experience and I was happy to be a part of it.

On watch the first brilliant idea I had was that we should shut down some sonar arrays. They take up power and we were at periscope depth so they weren’t really all that necessary. So I wandered into the sonar shack with the intention of telling them to shut some stuff down, but when I opened the door I was immediately greeted by our senior sonar tech in his underwear who announced to me all wild-eyed that they had already shut everything down and they were only on the hull array. Later I thought to myself that he should have asked me first before he did that but in the moment I just said good and backed away slowly, and then quickly.

Our senior sonar tech was in his underwear because as I alluded to for our poor Gulf of Aden friends as soon as you shut down the reactor it gets hot. You can only run the air conditioning when you have the reactor because the load is too big for the diesel. And out there near the equator the water temperature is in the 80s, and as the submarine is, you know, immersed in water the coolest it can ever get is in the 80s. Then you add into the mix every source of heat on the submarine, such as any cooking that happens, all the waste heat from the computers, all the body heat from over 100 people, and oh yeah all the latent heat in the steam plant and the decay heat from a whole nuclear reactor and it gets so very very hot on the submarine. Sweat dripping down the walls hot. Our captain pretty quickly said people could go to half-mast on their coveralls, and I was unfortunate enough to get to witness the good (he was not very good) captain set the example by peering through the periscope in his white boxers and white undershirt, positively glowing in the dim red lights of our overheated control room.

My prescient prediction during the pre-watch brief that we might surface, or might not, came true very quickly when the captain burst in to tell the OOD to do a 10-second high-pressure blow. We did that and we were surfaced. Usually surfacing is a bit slower than that, but without the reactor you couldn’t do it the slow way and since we were going to be in this for a bit it was better to be bobbing on the surface instead of maintaining periscope depth. Surfacing through presented some troubles, namely that we had to send someone up to the bridge to man it up there and also have two people on the periscopes and there were barely enough warm bodies to go around. I was on periscope while the bridge got manned by the off-going OOD. Luckily my OOD had gotten the diesel started and came back to man the periscope with me. Once the bridge got manned we had to decide who was going to go up and relieve him since he was off-going. I gave my OOD (well he was supposed to be OOD but due to this whole thing he wasn’t OOD) the option of going up, but he said he would rather stay in control, so up I went to man surface OOD. And man lemme tell ya it was nice. As I was heading up there my poor helm made a point to note that he couldn’t maintain a course within 40 degrees of anything. Since we were in an emergency we were on the emergency propulsion motor which on a good day gives you like three knots but since it wasn’t a good day it wasn’t giving us anything at all really so without propulsion we couldn’t maintain course. That was fine, really, we had no place to be. So there I was on watch with nothing to do since we had nowhere to go and everyone was really busy trying to get the neutrons back in the reactor or whatever. The biggest decision I had to make is that my Chief of the Watch called up and asked if there was any way we could run the high pressure air compressor since we had used up all our air on the surfacing procedure, and so I called back to the Engineering Officer of the Watch, who was pretty busy, and asked nice, and he said we could, so there you go (he had to balance loads on the diesel).

To be continued…