Rockin' and Rollin'

Wednesday, January 14, 2009
I slept little last night: too much violence of motion, too much noise of smashing water and complaining steel. Pitch was worse than roll, but—beds being aligned with the long axis—roll tends to throw us out of bed. There are little fences to keep one from going to the floor, but it does nothing about letting one sleep. About 9 a.m. the ride smoothed out enough for me to doze for a couple of hours. When I came to work, we were doing 6.5 knots again. That puts Cape Town about 33 days from here, but that beats the 56 days required at 4 knots. Hopefully, the Atlantic will ease back a bit and we can get up to 8 or 9 knots. The duration becomes important, because food, medications, and tempers are running out. There is some small hope that we will recover telephones and internet. If not, it might be Murder, He Wrote.


Two of us young captains were each flying an F-A across the north Atlantic to be delivered to Turkey. Ready to depart Goose Bay, Labrador for Sondrestromfjord, Greenland, the briefing we received from Major Huoni had the weather, distances, magnetic deviations, approach anomalies, and so on. Shepard and I were dressed in our poopie suits, rubber things that were supposedly water-proof, to keep us alive for a few minutes if we went down. Huoni, by way of survival, said: “If you go down and survive the ejection sequence, you’ll land in ice water, or on ice. The time of useful consciousness is three or four minutes, so get into your raft fast. If you don’t freeze to death first, there will soon be a polar bear come to eat you, and he can. He can out swim you, out run you, and out climb you. If this occurs, we recommend that you take out your survival knife and stab yourself in the heart.”

The F-5 squadron was based at Williams AFB, AZ, a tenant to a Training Command base. Two of those beautiful little fighters were engaged in air-to-air combat maneuvering and collided. One pilot ejected, his parachute opening at 14,000 feet. Dangling beneath him on a string was his seat pack, followed by a survival kit, followed a yellow dingy. He landed in the desert, and when rescue folks got there, he was taking a drink of water in the shade of his life raft. The other pilot did not survive.

If you do not know what an F-5 looks like, it was the Mig in “Top Gun”. Two twenty-millimeter canons, one on each side, the pilot looking right down the barrel, they have. It is small, smokeless, highly maneuverable, and really fun to fly. They didn’t have enough engine (a variant of the GE J-85), until the F and G models came out. The Air Force wanted no competition for its Lightweight Fighter (now the F-16), so they forbade a big engine in the F-5. The F-20, with the GE F-404 engine, was an outgrowth, and that was one of the finest fighters ever built, according to Chuck Yeager. When I win the lotto, I am going to buy an F-5, paint it grey and red with white stars and a portrait of Robert E. Lee on one side of the vertical tail and Stonewall Jackson on the other. Then I’ll start a fight with Detroit. But…alas; this is a sea story, not one of airplanes ( but to tell the truth, I’d rather fly than float, with me doing the chores in either case).

Thursday, January 15, 2009
I came to work today with an empty slate. There doesn’t seem to be a single thought in my head, which slept way too long and which had not enough discipline to get out of bed and go run. I feel like I haven’t justified eating. Yesterday my weight was 196 to 212. Today it is 198 to 210, so the seas are lying down some, and so am I. It is actually difficult to find anything social to do. Even the gym is tough, because the motion is pronounced and erratic, a good way to end up with barbells in your teeth. Some years ago, I was in really good shape (running 5 to 10 miles a day) and we were bringing a spanking new ship out of the yard in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It had a lot of problems, as all new ships do. I was running 7-minute miles on the treadmill when the vessel experienced a sudden loss of all electrical power and subsequently blacked out. The treadmill stopped suddenly, but I didn’t. I ran over the thing and landed on my chin and knees, with one knee being skinned by the treadmill belt. I started a habit of hanging onto the machine when running and have since had two similar occurrences. However, pitch and roll do to the treadmill what they do for the bathroom scales, and hanging on is a chore. That ship, the Luigs, and its sister ship, the Ryan, were both built in the Harland and Wolf ship yard in Belfast, the place and company that built the Titanic.

When I came to Belfast, they were attempting to conclude a treaty between the internecine parties of Orangemen and Catholics. There has basically been a war going on in Northern Ireland for 400 years, since King John invaded from England in cahoots with his Scottish fellows. The invaders won, and they took all the prime land, waterways, forests, buildings, and so on for themselves. This relegated the Irish to a permanent position of poverty and inferiority, and that brought rebellion. The Irish still saw the Orangemen as invaders after 400 years. When I showed up, the two sides were attempting to reach a peaceful agreement, and one can frankly thank the women on each side for bringing enough pressure on their men folk to stop killing each other’s kids, and then each other. Street corners were still armed blockades and screen wire covered windows and doors to deflect grenades and bombs. Murals of masked gunmen were prominent on buildings and windows. Angela’s Ashes is assuredly not a made-up tragedy. There were burned out buildings all over the Catholic side of town. For the most part, Northern Ireland has no hardwood forests remaining: they went into British sailing ships at 60 acres of trees per ship. They became English or Scottish mansions, and they were chopped to eradicate hiding places for armed rebels.

And so—Forrest Gump-like—here came Griffith. The two parties were collected en masse in a nice, modern opera house/theater in Belfast. Agreements and wording was being hammered into a document to stop the killing and to rebuild a fractured nation. As it happened, the following week the Bolshoi Ballet was to be in the building for a major production of Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky. It is some of my favorite music so, unaware of the political doings all around me, I walked right up to the ticket window to buy a ticket. No one was in it, but the foyer was bustling. In I went in search of a ballet ticket, making first one inquiry, then another. At last, two big, red-haired policemen attached themselves to my arms and asked for my credentials. My explanation apparently wasn’t germane to their expectations. We were quickly on the way to the paddy wagon or the nearest exit, and I was hoping to be thrown out on my keester and forgotten. One said, “Yoink, are yeh?”
“Yessir,” I sirred.
“Wott in ‘ell’s machinery are ye doon ‘ere wi’ no credentials?” he asked.
“Trying to buy a ballet ticket,” I bespoke as humbly as I could grovel.
“Boi a BOLLAI ticket! ‘dja ‘ear that, Patty? Ee wants a poddiedoo!”
“ho, ho, har, har; poddiedoo, heh, heh,hooie” and so on. Disgusting. I thought we might break down into a tap dance and shuffle: “hideedoo, poddiedoo, hey-diddle, diddle and rollyvay, too.” tap, tap, tippytitippity tap.
At last the door approached, and they set me back down on my own feet, which apparently had been off the floor the while. One opened the door politely. He went on:
“Come back nex’ week, Yoink. Thissiz a political thin’, lots of s’curity and stuffed shirts, if ye know wott oi mean. Ye canna’ come in here just noi. God speed ye.”
I’ve been thrown out of a few places, including my own home, but this was tactfully done, and their peace has lasted: it may be because of me. The ballet was superb.

Finally, we are doing 7.5 to 8 knots and the period on swells and waves is such that the motion is slow, not violent. We move around a lot, but it is manageable. We just passed the 5,000 mile marker to Cape Town, so we are counting down steadily. This day has been vanilla; nothing in it, no to-do items, few original thoughts. Thus I close my missal this night at 11° 50.5’ N and 53° 40.1’ W. Before long the latitude number will become zero at the equator, and then become negative numbers. By the by: this is deep water beneath us.

Friday, January 16, 2009
11 degrees north and 52.1 degrees west—rough as the dickens today, especially in roll. My weight is 194 to 216, so the seas are up again. In a fighter plane, the pilot’s weight can be zero to1600 pounds for a man of 200 pounds pulling zero to 8 g’s. I did manage a decent workout today by hanging on the treadmill handles vigorously, hoping that tomorrow my weight will only be 195 to 205.

Unhappily, I am not inspired or quick-thinking today, like the young corpsman was at the Naval Infirmary when the Admiral came in for a check up. The Admiral quickly admonished the young corpsman:
“Corpsman, I am an officer and a busy one, so please get on with these proceedings.”
“Yes, sir,” said the corpsman, “Just drop your trousers and lay down on your stomach so I can get your temperature.”
“Oh, all right then, but hurry it up.”
The corpsman disappeared for a few minutes and then came back and inserted the rectal device. Then he walked out, leaving the door open.
The Admiral lay there with his derriere looking skyward when a nurse walked by, stopped and looked.
“What are you looking at?” barked the Admiral; “Haven’t you ever seen anyone have their temperature taken before?”
“Yes, Admiral,” she said, “but not with a daffodil.”

The finest ship that I ever saw is the Glomar Explorer. She has an interesting history and was built strong, really strong. In 1968, North Korea intercepted the USS Pueblo in international waters and hi-jacked it, holding its crew hostage and stealing all the secrets from the super-secret intelligence ship. They acquired crypto books, electromagnetic instruments, and spy information of immense importance. Naturally the US did nothing whatsoever about it. Everything that was stolen was given to the Soviets. The United States had no idea about the amount of intelligence compromised or of the damage done, and so the State was in limbo concerning many strategic items, including the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks II (SALT II) with the Soviets, and so we did nothing. Seven months earlier, the Israelis attacked the sister ship of the Pueblo, the USS Liberty, killing 34 sailors in the Mediterranean. That crew fought back and saved their ship. Its commander, Captain McGonagal, was presented the Congressional Medal of Honor. Both attacks were surprises and completely unsuspected. However, Captain Bucher of the Pueblo was apparently less prepared and less courageous than Captain William McGonagal.

The capture of the Pueblo completely unsettled the government: this was in January. In May, a Soviet Golf-class submarine went missing in the north Pacific. The US knew about this event by virtue of a great array of sea-floor listening networks. We were able to triangulate a precise position of a vessel that had exploded, or imploded, some seven hundred nautical miles north of Oahu in 16,000 feet of water. The Soviets launched a massive search and recovery effort, which validated what we already thought we knew: the K-129 had catastrophically failed and broke up and lay on the sea bottom at a location known only to us. The USS Mizar and the US research submarine Halibut, searched for and found the sunken vessel, taking many photos of the wreckage. This work came to the attention of the White House and the CIA.

Nixon authorized a black program to build a vessel to retrieve the submarine wreckage, and the CIA was the operator, for security reasons. The ship was built in the Sun Shipyards, near Baltimore. They spared no expense. The main deck steel plating was two inches thick, and three inches in load-bearing areas. Hull was three or more inches. The vessel, as my memory serves me, was 618 feet long by 116 feet wide, and it displaced 50,000 tons at operating weight. At the bow were three 2,000 hp tunnel thrusters. Aft were two 2,000 hp skeg thrusters and two reversible main screws, rated at 13,000 hp each. The moon pool was 199 feet long by 75 feet wide with water tight doors that could be closed or open. A moon pool is a void in the vessel that gives access to the ocean.

Delco Electronics was charged with the engineering solutions and was ram-rodded by a great mathematician named Mason. He worked out the basic mathematical model to drive a ship by dynamically positioning against the sum of environmental forces by applying exact opposing forces via thrusters and screws. (I found a copy of his work on the secure bridge of the Explorer and it is a treasure to me. Mason was good.)

The vessel was to be dynamically positioned by navigating on seabed-mounted acoustic beacons. Beacons transmitted a pulse on its assigned frequency. Ship-mounted equipment measured each pulse and triangulated the ships position relative to the beacons. If environmental forces were not too inclement, it was possible to hold the ship dead still in the water over a pin-point location and maintain it. It was in this manner that the Explorer could hold itself directly over the submarine some 16,500 feet below it, and thereby recover portions of the sub.

That is exactly what happened. Under guise of mining the seabed for manganese, and fronted by Howard Hughes (the ship was named Hughes Glomar Explorer), the CIA, with a special drilling crew, sailed the boat to the location of the dead submarine and picked up portions of it. The official story from the government is mostly disinformation, and some denial, coupled with failures that limited the work that could be done, but it can be correctly presumed that very valuable knowledge was taken. Six Soviet sailors were recovered with the wreckage, but they were highly contaminated with radiation. They were encased safely and buried at sea, and the ceremony was taped. Later, those tapes were turned over to the Soviets, who naturally accused us of sinking their boat. If you are interested in this tale, of which I only touch, read The Jennifer Project, or go online for Glomar Explorer. You’ll be lied to a bit and mislead, but the SALT II accords were signed immediately after that mission.

In 1997 Global Marine (Glomar) Drilling, Inc., leased the Explorer from the Navy. The ship will always belong to the Navy, but it has been modified with the removal of all the cloak-and-dagger stuff, closing in the moon pool (now 47’ X 75’), adding four 3,000 hp fully azimuthing thrusters, four 20-cylinder EMDs, and a full drilling package. It is capable of drilling in approximately 10,000 feet of water. It remains the best-built and most substantial ship I ever saw. I never thought highly of Global Marine, however, so I did not remain there.
One more short tale about this storied, tough ship: we took it into the ship yard at Mobile and were being pushed slowly by tug boats. One boat failed and left us drifting a very few feet per minute toward a steel-reinforced concrete berth, eight feet thick. The bow struck it at maybe 20 or 30 fpm, and pier just peeled back, like rotten wood. We drove eleven feet into that thing and the only thing that it did to us was to ruin the paint job for four or five feet.