Whoops! USS Port Royal edition

I was Officer of the Deck when we passed through the Continental Divide. I've always thought that was the coolest thing ever. (Well, in my own little world of geekdom.)

 

I was just a 19-year-old PO3 Squidly that didn't have a sea and anchor station, so it was basically a however many hour sight seeing expedition. Then, when we got to Rodman, that was my first real foreign port liberty call, and it was a rather interesting night.

 

My father always told the story of his ship sailing into the approach to the Canal early in WW II while flying the previous day's recognition signals. He said the reception was interesting for a few minutes.

 

I was on a ship that hit something leaving port in Alexandria, Egypt. The ship was tugged all the way to Naples for repairs. The CO later made admiral.

 

Didn't some US sub slam into an unmapped underwater (obviously) mountain a couple of years ago?

What ever happened to that driver? As I recall, there was some gray area as to whether he could have done anything different, but I may be misremembering.

 

Outta now be called the Crown Royal, IMO.

 

My uncle is a retired Admiral and former Captain of several nuclear subs. He doesn't talk much about what he did, but the one story he does tell involves, IIRC, a Soviet ship back in the 70s. Uncle's boat was shadowing it for a while and one day he's looking through the scope and notices that much of the crew is out on the Soviet deck, lollygagging around. They are unshaven, the boat looks like a wreck -- all in all, a very poor example of Soviet sailing.

So uncle decides to surface his boat, scarying the hell out of the Soviets. He then has his commanders join him on the tower and he gets on his loudspeaker and starts to say to his crew, "Gentlemen, please see our friends from the Soviet Union, and notice the condition of their ship and their sailors...etc etc"

At which point an alarm sounds an the Soviet crew all going scrambling off deck, getting the hell out of the US crew's eyesight.

Now I don't remember the exact details of how all this went down, but you get the gist of what he did.

 

Lollygaggers!

 

That wreck killed a guy. CO got canned: http://www.maritimequest.com/in_the_news_pages/uss_sanfrancisco_ssn_711_grounding.htm

 

Sad, sorry to hear it.

If you scroll all the way down to the bottom of that page, the picture of the canned CO isn't exactly confidence-inspiring.

 

A British and French sub collide...somewhere.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/world/europe/17submarine.html?_r=1&hp

 

Harbor pilot = toast along w/ skipper