Chapter 7
Our Shakedown Cruise And Its Significance, Impressions Of Our Shakedown Cruise, A Multi-Vessel Exercise From Below
Our Shakedown Cruise And Its Significance
We had completed certifying that all the changes made during the refit were up to specification. We no longer went out to sea on very brief trips carrying 2 or 3 times our normal personnel compliment. I was able to return to my bunk. Now we entered into a shakedown period, where the crew would be trained, the submarine pushed to the edge of her limits, and all the procedures and routines necessary to our function as a warship in the US Navy would be tested. For this purpose, we set out on a long shakedown cruise to the Caribbean and Puerto Rico, where tracking and testing facilities had been set up. This was for all of us, (and me in particular), the most fun and most exciting part of my year aboard the Boone.
In retrospect, from today, I can recognize another important function of this shakedown period for me. Finally, after living the life of a dedicated but impecunious medical student and resident doctor, I would have my fling into the wider world. Whether conscious or not, I desired to experience the dissolute life of a sailor on shore leave. After this shakedown cruise, I would have this experience — or certainly enough of it to realize that it was not anything that really mattered to me. I didn’t know it at the time but within 4 months of tasting this kind of freedom, I would be ready to settle down and ask Sondra to be my wife. But that was still in the future.
Impressions Of Our Shakedown Cruise
For most of our trip down to the Bahamas, we travelled on the surface. I suppose our speed provided some stability, as we were not just a floating cork being pushed about by swells. Nonetheless, like every submarine, we lacked a keel, so it made for a rough trip. Although I am prone to seasickness, I handled the trip fairly well. I think always being inside of the submarine hull helped, as I was unaware of a moving horizon which would likely have resulted in severe dizziness and nausea. Much of the time I simply lay in my bunk, passing the time by trying to estimate where I was in space using my positional sense alone. Lying there, I would estimate rolling to starboard 30 degrees, and then diving downward 20 degrees, then stopping and slowly rolling back over to port another 30 degrees while beginning to pitch up 20 degrees. The sea was like a gentle continuous cradle all around, and outside the hull, always moving. Sometimes we would slowly go into a deep, seemingly endless roll, reaching what I thought was 40 to 50 degrees. I would feel the motion pause, and we would seem to hang there for a few seconds. I could imagine us continuing to roll and capsize into our doom. (I doubt if the hull would ‘leak’, and I had heard of talk in the wardroom of a World War II submarine that had been upright on its stern, underwater, almost 90 degrees and had still survived. However, I instinctively knew that at a certain point on the way to capsizing, to turning upside down, all systems would stop and the submarine would be doomed.)
I sometimes found myself playing a mental game of ‘chicken’ during these deep rolls, seeing how much fear I could generate with my imagination alone. I could do a pretty good job on myself and then we would start rolling back to a neutral position and I would finally begin to breathe. Somehow, the crew, who unlike me had functions to perform, managed to perform them. For me, the most difficult part of the rolling motion was steadying myself in the passageway as I walked to the wardroom for meals.
My perspective of the crew’s shakedown activities was from the inside and thus limited. It also means that my memories of this time are brief and scattered, like video flashes without time stamps. I think the entire shakedown cruise took about 3 weeks. We were heading for an area of the Caribbean known as the ‘Tongue of the Ocean’. This was the place where the deep Atlantic stuck out her tongue and curled it around Nassau Island, making it the perfect site for an underwater naval test facility. We would be going there to test the submarine’s sound signature and our sonar equipment. We were also scheduled to stop at the naval base at Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico and we would spend some time at the end of a long pier at Frederiksted in St. Croix. These were to be brief stops, with some nighttime liberty, and generally lasting no more than a few days. During the day, we would carry out a set of training exercises, both on the surface and under water.
If I am honest, much of the time I had no idea what was going on. I was not bared from any information going about the boat; my ‘secret clearance’ was as good as anyone else’s; it’s just that we lived in a subtle atmosphere where ‘need to know’ was respected. I only needed to know whether any exercise might involve a potential medical hazard and if so, be prepared. For this, I relied on my Doc. Even before I might bring it up, he had already made the necessary preparations. (We never had a problem. Everything went smoothly from the medical perspective.)
Before I beat myself up for being ignorant about what was happening, it should be noted that nowhere was posted a daily bulletin listing the boat’s activities. Nor was I privy to the XO’s clipboard that held the schedule. Everything was passed down by word of mouth through the various chains of commands. Often, 3 or 4 divisions would be running exercises simultaneously. The communications team might be testing phones, while sonar and engineering and navigation would be running exercises of their own at the same time.
Naturally, what I remember are the those exercises that directly effected me. There were only a few and they were usually announced over the intercom. I would go down to the control room to watch them.
We performed some shakedown drills like an ‘emergency dive’, and then while we were deep, an ‘emergency blow’ to reach the surface as fast as our sudden buoyancy would take us. I watched from the control room, holding on to a pole. Until the submarine broke the surface, there was little noticeable change aside from the steep angle on the deck and the march of numbers on the depth gauge. But they were fun rides.
The ‘deep dive’ is the ultimate test whether a submarine is sea-worthy. (It was estimated that we could safely reach a depth of 900 feet. At that time this was ‘secret’ information. But now, 50 years later, and like anything else you will read here, it’s public knowledge.)
When the order came for our descent down to our maximum certifiable depth, to check whether in fact we could reach it and still be able to return, there was quiet throughout the entire boat. Everyone was tense and listening for any noise that might signify a malfunction or leak. Gliding down to 900 feet, we heard nothing but random squeaks and pops as the hull reacted to the change of ocean pressure with each change of depth. In the control room, I watched as we passed 400 feet, which was our record at the time. Then the numbers slowly began dropping into depths new to the Daniel Boone and its crew. Everyone was holding their breath.
No one really knew how far down our submarine could dive before the weight of the ocean caused the hull to give way. No one knew our actual crush depth, we only had estimates from the engineers. The engineers knew, if the hull gave way, the force of water would slam together the bulkheads separating the different compartments with such force that the entire submarine would act like one large diesel piston. The temperature inside would hit a thousand degrees within a tenth of a second. I guess it was somewhat reassuring to know if you crushed, you would not have to worry about either drowning or pain. However, if the boat began flooding and became too heavy to respond to the sudden buoyancy of an emergency blow, then you could do nothing but continue to drift down. Your actual death might be painless but your final moments waiting to meet that inevitable end (which could be minutes) would be something no one wants to even try to imagine. Such were some of my thoughts (and nightmares) while watching this exercise proceed. Nonetheless, I was able to watch the boat go deep without panic, and then I felt the relief as we started going back ‘up’. I realized I could talk my self through the descent and calm my fears going down, but nothing could temper my relief going up.
A Multi-Vessel Exercise From Below
One day our submarine was involved with some exercise with a couple of surface ships. I had no idea what the exercise involved or what was its purpose. It was not the province of the Quack to know (or to ask). Nonetheless, I was curious. Having nothing else to do while this exercise was underway, I wandered over to the control room to watch its progress and perhaps see if I could winkle out some meaning or purpose.
I found the captain standing at the conn, holding a CB microphone in the palm of his hand. The microphone contained a small speaker that was clearly audible to all in the control room. He was engaged in a conversation with a surface ship’s captain somewhere over and above us. When he wanted to talk to the ship, the Captain would hold the microphone near his mouth and press a button on its side. Our sonar apparatus would amplify his words and they would be sent off from our submarine to the ship floating above. Any answer from the ship was returned through the speaker in his hand.
This entire communication system struck me as rather low-tech, especially as I watched with some surprise how poorly the system seemed to function. I knew enough to know that a radio link was not possible underwater. Why else would we have to come to the surface and stick up an antenna to send and receive radio signals. I also knew that some type of phone wire playing out between us and the ship above was totally impractical. It seemed that the submarine could only talk to the ship and vice versa by shouting at each other underwater. This type of communication struck me as less effective than 2 tin cans tied together by string.
I watched the Captain ask the same questions over and over. I heard the intermittent answers from the ship above, sometimes distinctly, but sometimes suddenly disappearing almost mid-syllable. At other times the ship’s voice from above would dilate in volume and then slowly fade off into silence, crackles and incoherence. It was random and unpredictable.
I watched the Captain’s rising frustration as he repeated things over and over, including whether his prior words had been received. Every thing seemed muddled. Sometimes it was impossible to match the Captain’s questions with the answers coming back down. I could picture the Captain’s voice rising from our submarine’s sonar as undulating bubbles, like the breath of a great whale. Like such bubbles, the sounds of the Captain’s voice rose toward the surface, passing through the water and separating, intermixing and gliding back into each other. Everything coming back from the surface ship to our submarine, and pouring out from the speaker held in the Captain’s hand, likewise seemed confused, and frustratingly out of phase. I could well understand the Captain’s irritation. It was not pleasant to watch.
I gathered that we were acting as a decoy of sorts. We were an underwater target that the surface ships were trying to detect and give chase. I can’t be certain that this was what the exercise was about. If it were, that alone would infuriate the Captain. He was a proud man and would not look kindly on having his boat used in this fashion. But if those were his orders, he would have no choice other than to obey. Finding all of this frustration and annoyance ultimately unpleasant to witness, I left the control room.
Even 50 years ago I was aware of the irony. We represented the height of technology at the time; we were a nuclear vessel at the beginning of the computer age. Yet our Captain could barely get through to another ship’s captain on the surface. The bank of navigation and GPS computers filling the rear of our control room has been many times improved and miniaturized such that today it fits snugly into our mobile phones. Yet our communication from person to person remains brittle and fragile, prone to misunderstanding. Sometimes I feel that all of today’s cellular phone calls, texts and emails only offer more opportunity for miscommunication, incoherence and frustration. Nothing seems to have changed in that regard.