0600 Periscope depth to fix position with regard to Cape of Good Hope. The sky is overcast and weather not too favorable for the photo reconnaissance which we had planned. Went deep and continued running.
1136 At periscope depth with contact on Hangklip Point, South Africa. Resumed base course and speed heading for Cape of Good Hope. As we enter the Atlantic Ocean again, we observe a noticeable drop in the water temperature. At the same time, we are most anxious to notice whether there is any definable current. Charts and Sailing Directions indicate that this is the case, probably setting us to the northeast. Without a fathometer, we are staying well clear of possible shoal water in anticipation of this effect.
1330 Held Easter Sunday services. Pat McDonald brings new life to the Easter Story. The little mess-hall chapel is nearly full.
1400 At periscope depth. Cape of Good Hope is in sight through the periscope, bearing 348° true about 10½ miles. It was named thus to be a good omen for men, and we take it as such.
1408 Sighted a ship bearing 308° true about 8 miles away. Stationed the tracking party. The ship is a 6,000 to 8,000 ton tanker with a nice clipper bow, but her counter stern, tall stack and large rabbit-ear ventilators belong to a vessel of older vintage. She may pass close enough for us to obtain periscope photographs, provided she remains on her present track. Joe Roberts is standing by, itching to get a picture, and I am beginning to worry over the fact that the ship, evidently making for the Indian Ocean, may change course toward us in rounding the Cape. We will embarrass him if he sees our periscope near his intended track. In such a case, it is quite possible he might precipitantly turn in such a way as to endanger himself or us. We must remain doubly alert where probability of a course change exists, to detect the change and go deep in good time.
I always worry through all these difficult possibilities almost by reflex; and in the meantime, as the ship passes safely by, Joe Roberts has an ideal opportunity to get a picture. The ship has a black hull, clipper bow, counter stern, a white stripe below the gunwale. [The third ship we have sighted this voyage with this distinctive feature.] Her superstructure and upper works are white with black and red trim. Her foremast is painted all white and her mainmast is white for the lower one-third and black above, where her stack smoke would blacken it anyway. Both masts are stick masts. We are almost, but not quite, able to read the name on the stern.
She has no colors visible and therefore we have no knowledge as to her nationality, but she is obviously not an American, for American ships rarely present this good an appearance.
1540 Weather conditions near the Cape are going to prevent our photo reconnaissance from being as successful as we would like, but we shall close in a bit and get what we can. Mt. Vasco de Gama on the Cape of Good Hope reminds me of Diamond Head, having somewhat the same shape and dimensions, though not quite the same rugged characteristics. Possibly Good Hope is a considerably older formation. Little foliage or natural growth is visible, something of a surprise for this temperate latitude [33°S].
1618 Periscope depth once more for photographic reconnaissance. There seems to be a haze in the distance and we are unable to focus clearly upon the Cape of Good Hope. After a careful sweep panorama, we call it a day.
1721 With Cape of Good Hope bearing 117° true, distance 8 miles, took departure for St. Peter and St. Paul’s Rocks in the mid-Atlantic. We will arrive there on the 25th of April.
Monday, 18 April 1960 0000 Smoking lamp is relighted. Maybe I am a bit sadistic: no one was expecting it; so instead of directing that the word be passed to relight the smoking lamp, I strolled about the ship smoking a cigar, blowing smoke in the faces of various people and inquiring in a pleasant conversational tone, “Don’t you wish you could do this?” It took some 37 seconds for the word to get around.
As in any group, there were probably a few of our people who secretly welcomed the no-smoking edict as a crutch to help them make the break from the habit. By far the majority had no intention of stopping; and it is noticeable that few, if any, have continued their abstinence after the smoking lamp was once lighted. An exception is Tom Thamm, who had entered into a no-swearing pact with his two friends, Chiefs Loveland and Blair. Terms were that the first man to breach the rules would continue to abstain for another day after the smoking lamp was relighted. There may have been some collusion in this case, for, shortly after the terms had been agreed upon, Jim Stark appeared on the scene and yanked a yellow hair out of the middle of the Thamm chest while the others distracted his attention.
Thamm’s yelping malediction toward the good Doctor was witnessed with glee by all three plotters; and now Thamm sits grimly in the wardroom inhaling second-hand smoke, mumbling at the faithlessness of all shipmates, vowing that he will carry out his part of the wager, come what may, and swearing by the few remaining hairs on his chest that Messrs. Stark, Blair and Loveland will regret the episode.
1105 We are passing near a charted seamount and sure enough, the echo-ranging sonar detects it. We are becoming expert at this operation and it is a reassuring one.
Wednesday, 20 April 1960 0100 Crossed from east to west longitude.
Today is my birthday and also Lt. Sawyer’s. After dinner I repaired to my cabin to work on this report.
1900 Chief of the Ship Fitzjarrald came knocking on my door saying, “Something is wrong down in the mess hall, Captain; we need you down there right away.” This is a strange message for the skipper of a ship to receive.
“What’s the matter, is there a fight?” I asked, starting up from my desk. It was only a jump down the ladder to the lower deck and forward one compartment into the crew’s mess hall, where I was greeted by popping flash bulbs, a raucous rendition of “Happy Birthday to You” and a tremendous birthday cake. The cake, prepared by Ramon D. Baney, CS2(SS), was about 2 feet square and 2 inches thick, with great extravagant gobs of frosting all over it. Ray Meadows, Joe Roberts and William R. Hadley were there too, of course, with cameras en echelon.
Earlier that afternoon there had been a cake and coffee ceremony for George Sawyer in the wardroom; I was, quite candidly, looking forward to another cake at dinner, and was caught completely by surprise. It has been a very pleasant day with much good cake eaten by all.
A third birthday for which April 20th used to be remembered in certain quarters went unnoticed: one Adolf Hitler, now deceased.
Friday, 22 April 1960 Our 8th babygram arrived today for Gerald W. Gallagher, IC1(SS), who has an 8 1b. boy born on the 20th. Gallagher, all smiles, informs me delightedly that the child, if a boy, was to have been named Timothy Edward. With Edward in his name and April 20th for his birth certificate, this lad will go far, and in testimony thereof, this calls for a cigar in reverse. Timothy Edward Gallagher’s Old Man gets the cigar.
Saturday, 23 April 1960 Tonight we are advised by a message that twenty-five more of our ship’s company have successfully passed the examinations for advancement in rate and are soon to be promoted. The news causes excited congratulations throughout the ship. Our statisticians are immediately busy and come up with the following rather remarkable set of figures: excluding the 5 Chief Petty Officers who are designated for commissioned rank, but including the First Class promoted to Chief Petty Officer and the 25 just named, a total of 60% of our men who took the exam have made the next higher rate. Counting only those listed in tonight’s dispatch, the percentage is 69%; and if one adds in the 5 new Ensigns, a total of 40 men, or 25% of the crew of 159, are to be promoted. Few ships in the US Navy will equal this performance.
Sunday, 24 April 1960 0436 Completed sealed-ship test, having run sealed for exactly two weeks. Remaining sealed is considerably less strenuous than ventilating once a day, and we are sorry to go back to the earlier routine. When you ventilate, you are attempting to conserve oxygen and at the same time trying to minimize time at periscope depth. It naturally develops that just before you ventilate the ship, her internal atmosphere is at its lowest in oxygen, its highest in carbon monoxide and car
bon dioxide. At this time cigarettes are difficult to light, a little exertion sets one to panting, and generally one does not feel in the best of form. On the other hand, with the ship sealed, you maintain a steady atmosphere and set your equipment to keep it that way.
During the sealed-ship test we had replenished our oxygen in two ways. First, there were the oxygen banks—great steel cylinders in which pure oxygen was stored under high pressure. Located external to Triton’s pressure hull, in the ballast tanks, they were piped to manifolds forward and aft where we could automatically control the rate of revitalization as the pressure in the banks dwindled.
Our second revitalization system made use of a device borrowed from miners, who had for years employed “oxygen candles” as an emergency oxygen source. Our “candles” were much larger than the miners’, but they were made of the same materials and were handled in a very similar manner. Under average conditions, we burned them in a specially designed oxygen furnace at the rate of two per hour, though as previously mentioned, this rate had to be increased on Fridays. Each “candle,” when exhausted, produced a large, heavy iron klinker, which in due course found its way to the garbage ejector.
The greatest problem in sealed operations, however, did not lie in maintaining the requisite oxygen content in our ship’s internal atmosphere. It was a matter of retaining the atmosphere itself, and this was a problem that remained with us the whole cruise.
To understand this, it must first be appreciated that many of a submarine’s mechanisms are operated by compressed air. After it is used, the air simply passes into the interior of the ship, where it becomes part of the ship’s internal atmosphere. During the first weeks of the cruise, therefore, the pressure built up slowly during the day and was suddenly vented off every night, when we extended our ventilation pipe to the surface and opened its cap. We discovered immediately that running all the air compressors at maximum capacity during the time we were renewing our atmosphere from outside was not enough to recharge as much air into our air banks as had been used. We were, in effect, slowly losing air. To combat this, we resorted to starting the air compressors well before raising our snorkel pipe, thus pumping the precious air back into the high-pressure air banks instead of belching it out when we opened the snorkel-head valve. This had the incidental disadvantage of increasing our “low-oxygen” symptoms and increasing the time we suffered from oxygen deficiency, but, worse, we still were not able to recharge as much air as we had used during the day.
Every night a check of the air banks showed that the maximum air-bank pressure we reached on charge was slightly less than it had been the previous night. Without compressed air a submarine cannot operate, a fact which had lain in my consciousness ever since depth charges had so damaged both of Trigger’s air compressors that it looked as if neither could be made to run again.
In Triton’s case, barring a breakdown of our compressors, we could solve the problem by merely leaving the snorkel up longer and waiting until the compressors had been able to retrieve their position. But to do so would require a sacrifice of speed of advance, since neither periscope nor snorkel tube could withstand cruising speed. And even if we in this manner recovered the air lost, it seemed to me that this would be an admission of our inability to operate our ship properly.
Our real problem lay in the fact that not all the compressed air used during the day was being discharged back into the ship’s interior volume. Some of it, somehow, was escaping to the sea. Even after “pumping down” to atmospheric pressure, there was every day slightly less air in the air banks. Obviously, this had to be resolved before beginning the sealed-ship tests.
If there is no leak in an external air line, the most logical place to lose air in a submarine is in blowing sanitary tanks, and this was where, it turned out, we were losing ours. Sanitary tanks, as their name implies, are the collecting tanks for all the waste products from the ship, human and otherwise. Periodically they must be emptied, which is done with compressed air. Considerable pressure of air is required to overcome the pressure of the sea at depth, and when the blowing is finished, all this air must be vented—released—back into the ship. Despite large canisters of activated carbon filters in the vent line, the odor this air brings back with it is pungently distinguishable and fermentedly corrupt. A “good blow” scours the tank, and carries more of the noxious vapor out with the water, and investigation developed the possibility that a little too much “scouring” was costing us a lot of valuable compressed air—not to mention the betraying bubbles thereby sent to the surface.
During the war, we all preferred a little temporary stink to enemy bombs, and sanitary tanks were therefore never blown completely dry when submerged in enemy waters. In our new and modern submarine, this same old smelly lesson had to be learned again, though for an admittedly different reason. In structions were issued to the tank blowers to keep a sizable water seal in all sanitary tanks at all times and to the rest of the crew to put clothespins on their noses if they were too uncomfortable during the venting periods.
The program was a success. Our air compressors began to gain on the air banks, and every night the final pressure stood a little higher instead of a little lower. And we suffered gamely whenever a sanitary tank was blown.
The man I felt sorriest for was Frank McConnell, the Electric Boat Guarantee Engineer. Good shipmate that he was, Frank never voiced a complaint, but more than once I saw him distractedly jump out of his bunk in the “attic” above the wardroom, unable to stay there longer. It may have been accidental—naturally the sanitary tank vent discharge had to go somewhere—but Will Adams said the vent piping was positively diabolical in its perfect aim at the head of Frank’s bunk.
As we ended the sealed-ship period, our air problems were behind us, but the memory remained. I found myself thinking that our first space travelers would have to solve this same problem in even more rigorous measure. Should they, through maloperation or misfortune, be unable to conserve their air supply, there would be no ready replenishment from an inexhaustible source only a few hundred feet away.
From the Log:
We have learned a lot about Triton during these two weeks of sealed-ship operations and are extremely gratified with the results. Among other things, we have had no difficulty at all in retaining our precious air inside the ship. But it was a good thing that we recognized the problem, or we might have.
15
The sealed-ship test, by design, had been scheduled to terminate on Sunday, the twenty-fourth of April. It would be a good way to finish off the circumnavigation, Will Adams had suggested, to give us something to think about during the last few days.
But on Sunday, as we resumed normal daily ventilation, I, for one, found it hard to keep from feeling a tingling excitement. Tomorrow, Monday, the twenty-fifth of April, we would have completed the first of our missions. With the return to St. Peter and St. Paul’s Rocks, carefully passing on the western side this time, Triton would become the first ship to accomplish the submariner’s dream of traveling, entirely submerged, completely around the world.
It would be on the sixtieth day of the circumnavigation, by our reckoning, but a man perched on the Rocks would have counted the sunrise sixty-one times; for we had lost a day by making the circuit in a westerly direction, following the sun.
On the other hand, we had been forced to set our ship’s clocks back one hour twenty-three times. Twenty-three of our days had thus been twenty-five hours in length (the shift to daylight saving time had also occurred, and the twenty-fourth extra hour would be returned to us in October).
The last several weeks of our trip had been singularly free from malfunction of any parts of the ship. It seemed as though we had finally shaken most of the bugs out. As events were shortly to prove, however, our travail might have been almost over—but it was not yet, quite.
From the Log:
24 April 1960, Sunday 2001 Serious casualty in the after torpedo room. The manner in which this develops is illust
rative of a point many naval officers are fond of making—there is no sudden alarm, no quick scurry of many people carrying out an expected drill. By the time anyone in authority even knew what had happened, the need for alarm was past. There was left only the correction of the trouble and clean up of the mess, which took some time. What took place is instructive:
The torpedoman on “Room Watch” in the after torpedo room, Allen W. Steele, TM3 (who had only last night been notified of his prospective advancement to Second Class), heard a loud report, nearly like an explosion as he later described it, followed by a heavy spraying noise. Turning, he saw clouds of oil vapor issuing from beneath the deck plates forward on the starboard side. Instantly realizing that this was serious trouble, Steele called the control room on the 7MC announcing system and reported a heavy hydraulic oil leak in the stern plane mechanism; then he plunged into the hydrant stream of oil hoping to find the leak and isolate it.
In the control room, Lt. Rubb was starting to make the routine preparations to bring the ship to periscope depth. His first indication of trouble came when Raymond J. Comeau, Electrician’s Mate Second Class, at the stern plane controls, noticed failure to respond to a small movement of his control arm, and called out in a voice edged with concern, “The stern planes are not working right, sir!” At nearly the same moment, the report of a large hydraulic leak in the after torpedo room was received from Steele.
“Whitey” Rubb’s action was the one for which we have trained many times: “Shift to Emergency!” Comeau threw a single toggle switch, tested controls and reported them satisfactory. This restored control of the ship, but it did not solve the basic difficulty [the quickness with which this action was taken is demonstrated by the fact that planes and rudder automatically switch to emergency power if the pressure in the main system falls to 1000 1bs; this had not yet occurred].
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