RetiredUSNChief
Member
You can't leave us minus the ending of your Submarine story!.....how did it end?
It ended well. We had a limited window of opportunity to resolve the issue (5 days) and then the boat had to re-deploy. The problem was that their symptoms didn't reappear, no matter what we did to try to make that happen. The last available day they wanted us to ride the boat on "sea trials" as they drove in circles around the island to show us that the problem would reappear. That got cancelled at the last minute as they needed to re-deploy and they wanted engineers on the boat during the deployment to resolve this.
That required a phone call back to my wife (This was in December and I'd miss Christmas at home and we had our 20th anniversary plans scheduled early January.)
Got the OK from my wife, packed my stuff, and deployed with the ship, myself and two other engineers from Huntington Ingalls to be working under me. We regrouped, mapped out a plan...and as soon as we got underway, the symptoms reappeared. We narrowed the problem down in just a few hours after casting off, Ship's Force fixed/replaced the suspect components, and the equipment was working normally by the third day.
We were still stuck on the boat until the end of the deployment, which was about three weeks. I spent the time working with Ship's Force troubleshooting/repairing several other systems that popped up while underway, played a lot of Euchre with the crew, grabbed cleaning equipment and participated in field day, did some training for the ship on certain repairs, sat in on their training, etc.
The Chief of the Boat (COB) was a former shipmate of mine back in the early 90s on the Narwhal, which was the submarine that the propulsion system on that ship was based on.
As a side note, I got to celebrate my tenth anniversary from never having to deploy on a submarine by deploying on a submarine, transitioning from Fleet Reserve (20 years) to actual Retired status (30 years) while underway. As a civilian. In a combat zone.
And made it home in time to renew our wedding vows the next day, then leave for our Bahamas cruise that afternoon. Where I got to celebrate 20 years with my wife on a ship that I didn't have to clean, operate, maintain, repair, or conduct drills on (with the exception of the obligatory muster drill).