Navy Story #1
On the Rocks
I was on the USS Pensacola (LSD-38), which is a Landing Ship Dock, meaning that it is capable of taking landing craft and other boats into its well deck through a gate at the stern (that's the back end), sort of like a drawbridge on a castle. I was on that ship for a little over 3 years.
Here are some pictures of the well deck:
Target practice from the wing wall
The above picture is of some of the guys shooting old oil barrels with a machine gun, but the reason I'm including this picture is that it also shows the top part of the stern gate (our "drawbridge"), in the lower right-hand part of the picture.
Well Deck
The above picture is of the well deck with a few boats in it. This picture is looking astern, and you can see the stern gate way at the back.
Flooded Well Deck
It's hard to see this, but if you look closely at the dark part in the center of the above picture, below the helicopter and helicopter deck, you can see some light reflecting off the water in the well deck. We were waiting for some boats to come back, probably. The stern gate was down, and the ship was ballasted down into the water, so naturally the water ran into the well deck!
Now, to a story. Here is a picture of Cuba:
Coast of Cuba
Note carefully the rocky coast. It figures in this story.
We were anchored off this part of the coast, and that night we ran an "intruder alert" drill. The night was extremely dark, no moon, maybe even clouds so there wasn't any light from stars. Anyway, it was really dark. We had to pretend that our ships might be attacked by scuba divers, so we had boats in the water slowly patrolling around each ship. I was the officer on the captain's boat. (The amphibious Navy didn't have money for the captain to have a fancy boat -- his boat got used for normal work, too.) After we had patrolled for awhile (which was kind of fun, believe it or not, because even though it was dark the weather was really nice), the boat's engineer told me that the transmission wasn't working. We had engine, but no power to the screw (propeller). We couldn't call for help, because we were simulating radio silence.
So we drifted. The wind was light, but definitely toward those rocks you saw in the picture. We eventually drifted against those rocks. The boat scraped up and down on them for awhile, and then I decided that we were in danger of capsizing. I told the radioman to break radio silence and call for help. After all, this was an exercise, not real war. So we got in touch with one of the larger boats that were just around a spit of land from us at Guantanamo Bay, and they came out, threw us a line, and towed us to the dock where they were moored. The boat's engineer discovered that the transmission fluid drain plug had not been put back in after they had changed the fluid that afternoon. Oops.
Anyway, the next day the captain had a bit of a court of inquiry (very informal in this case) so he could find out what went on. He was a bit upset by two things: His boat got scraped on the bottom, and we broke radio silence. (I guess he got a call from the admiral in charge of the task force.) After I told him what actually happened, he wasn't so mad. I had acted in good judgment and common sense.
Sometimes you need to break the rules. Sometimes.