In The Navy (On the Boat), Part 14

I have to explain the Towed Array that let us hear this exceptionally loud target. What we do is string out a long microphone way behind the ship and it picks up vibrations in the water, not really sounds. Things like the hum of a fluorescent light, which is 60 HZ here in the USA. In Brittan and most of Europe and eastward, it is 50HZ. That includes most foreign submarines. The Captain liked to call them “enemy” Boats, but I didn’t like that at all. We were not in a declared war and not a single shot had been fired (by the Military anyway). It was the Cold War.

So we had this target of interest right off the bat. After a few course changes, it became very clear that the target was very far away, because its true bearing never changed. We started heading towards it, as we were going that way anyway. A full day passed and we still had no clue how far away it was, but it was far. This was a real mystery.

Another day passed and we had other contacts always (trawlers and merchant ships), but this one was really nagging us. It was just sitting there drawing us in. More than once I went over to the Quartermasters (QMs) and had them plot the bearing out and it was pointing in the area of Brittan. Their Boats all ran on 50 HZ, so it could possibly be a really loud Boat of theirs.

We were just a few days out and Sheppard started nagging everyone who smoked, for smokes. I wanted to rip his stupid ass head off, we all did really. He had decided he would “quit” on this run and had brought no smokes with him. Then he didn’t have the will power to do it, to quit. We all wanted to keel haul this ass. I would wind up giving him one to get him to just leave me alone. He was begging like a person near death and it was pitiful to listen to. I loathed him.

Another day went by as we slowly approached our mystery target…we were on the lookout for other things too. When I came on watch that night, there were bangs going off at regular intervals. There is a small audio repeater that you can turn on right next to the FT station, and listen to what the Sonarmen are hearing. They were little booms, about every 10 or 15 seconds. I stuck my head into the Sonar shack and asked them what they were and they explained it was seismic explosions, so someone could map the bottom of the ocean. Pretty cool, I thought. It got old though and I switched off the audio repeater after a while.

We got closer to our target and we actually started seeing a slight change in bearing when we changed course. I really wanted to find out what this thing was. It was obviously in the ocean and not on land, we weren’t that close to England yet. We crept in slower.

The XO had taken interest in this contact also, he was always looking for a chance to stick a feather in his cap and was grasping at this one. He was there when we had gotten close enough to be able to see it visually. He took us up to PD, very unlike him to be doing this himself. Once there he raised the scope and looked around (you take a quick sweep around first, to make sure you are not about to run into anything).

He asked for a bearing to the target and I called it out. He looked at the bearing indicator on the Periscope and called me over to take the scope. He announced to the Control Room and Sonar that we had lost the contact. He even had it written into the ships log, because it had been mentioned there before now.

I swung the periscope around to the bearing and was not surprised to see an enormous BP Oil Rig there, brightly lit in the dark night…like a Christmas tree. That solved the mystery for me, but not the sense of loss for the XO. He turned the Con over to the regular Officer Of The Deck (OOD) and stomped out. The OOD came over and took the scope from me and certainly noted I was smiling and holding back a laugh. He looked out the scope and laughed too.

I had a good time breaking the news to the rest of the crew about our mysterious contact, but made sure to emphasize the XOs excitement, until he saw what the target was.