Navy Story #27
Finding a Lost Submarine
In a previous story (#3, "Maneuvering in the Wind") I told you about how we loaded a research submarine into the welldeck of the USS Pensacola. We took the submarine to the
Caribbean in November and December of 1974. The general idea of what we did down there was that we would offload the NR-1 submarine at a specific area of the sea, and then would travel to another specific spot to rendezvous
with the submarine and load it back into the welldeck after they had done some research and needed to go to another spot. We were basically their taxi to whatever spots they wanted to have a look at, since the sub didn't
travel fast enough (or at least, not as fast as we could) to make the trip between research spots feasible without our transport. And besides that, the sub was not a very large vessel and would be tossed around quite a bit
by the waves when the sub was surfaced. It was much nicer for the sub's crew to travel to their various research spots aboard our much larger ship, so we also served as a refresher spot for the NR-1's crew. They
liked to come aboard and have meals and some truly restful sleep aboard our ship. And we carried some pretty fancy communications gear that we used to stay in touch with the sub while it was submerged. It had something to
do with very low frequency sound waves or something like that. Anyway, it was a fascinating time. I enjoyed it a lot.
But we had a scare about halfway through our time down there. We had offloaded the NR-1 and had proceeded toward the next rendezvous spot. We had been en route to that spot for several
hours when the ship's Navigator suddenly discovered to his horror that there were two rendezvous spots on his charts with the same designation. We used letters to designate the spots, and he had discovered that there
were two "A" rendezvous spots. I don't remember for sure how far apart the two spots were, but they were several miles apart; definitely far enough apart that if we went to the wrong spot, the sub would be on
its own for several hours before we could get to the correct spot and load the sub. There was some danger to the sub if it had to be surfaced for several hours, especially in heavy seas (meaning that the waves were fairly
high), before we could load it back into our welldeck.
So the Captain called a conference with some of the senior officers and discussed with them how to resolve the situation. He decided that the best approach was to go at flank (fastest)
speed back toward the offloading spot, and then to go from there toward a spot pretty much midway between the duplicate rendezvous spots, trying to contact the sub en route. The seas in that part of the Caribbean were really
deep, and there was some concern that the sound waves of the communications device wouldn't be able to reach the sub, so the Captain came up with a rather novel idea: We would drop percussion grenades over the side to
try to get the attention of the sub's crew. A ship normally uses percussion grenades to prevent underwater attacks by scuba divers. But the grenades also make a very loud bang, the sound of which travels a long way.
So all during the night (it had been early evening when the navigator made his discovery) those of us who were not on watch could hear the explosions of the grenades every 5 minutes or so as we tried to sleep. But it was
worth the inconvenience and irritation. By morning the sub's crew had heard the grenades and decided that we were probably trying to contact them, so they surfaced and radioed to us. Then of course we found out where
they were, and went over there to rendezvous with them.
It turned out that we had indeed been heading for the wrong rendezvous point. It was really a good thing that the Captain decided to do what he did. He was a great Captain whose experience
was greatly appreciated. There's nothing like experience when you're in a tight spot! And it all turned out well in this case!