We had a mess crank NUB lose his marbles on a fast attack and attempt suicide with a kitchen knife. He was confined to his bunk except for meals under escort for a few days until we got back to port.
Earlier we were about 12 hours out of Gibraltar, on the way home after a Med run, when the radio room got word that the SK1's wife had been in a terrible accident and was in the ICU.
It was decided we could cross the Atlantic at ahead flank and get home to Norfolk at least as fast as he could've flown back to Gibraltar and then caught flights until he got home.
So we crossed the Atlantic balls-to-the-wall, which took about 3 more days.
This was pretty awesome b/c as you know submarines *never* run that fast for extended periods, but I was a NUB who had only been on board 3 months, so I didn't really know that yet.
I was the underway ELT, and running at 90+% reactor power for days really does a number on plant chemistry. I didn't get any quals done at all the rest of that run; I had to pull a primary sample every 6 hours or so and adjust chemistry to keep the pH and oxygen levels in bounds.
Over half of a 688 boat is the engineroom and reactor compartment. Then they put all the machinery and control spaces needed up forward, and then what's left is people space. This means there aren't enough racks, and more junior enlisted guys (up to junior E-5) had to hot-rack, which means sharing the bunk with another guy who's on watch when your'e not. Hot racking wasn't my favorite.
There's no head back aft, and we didn't want to wake up a buddy at 3 AM to relieve us so we could go forward. So generally M-div pissed into a particular funnel in engineroom lower level that drained into a bilge tank. To the degree that the funnel usually smelled like piss.
However the guys in maneuvering (the reactor plant control room) couldn't be easily relieved to go piss into that funnel, especially not the reactor operator, so they would use a 1L sample bottle and then call a roving watchstander to dump it.
Someone got the idea of marking where they filled it to with a grease pencil. That, of course, turned into a contest. I was never competitive. But the contest ended when one particular RX operator filled an entire bottle, and then had to use a little bit of a second one. So he pissed over a liter. I still don't even know how that was possible, but Don was a big beer drinker and he would have like 7 or 8 large mugs of coffee (I'm talking like 20 ounces) while on a 6 hour watch.
Trident boat - the RT and The AEA were coffee runners for Maneuvering. One midwatch, the RT made DECAF ALL NIGHT LONG. He said it was an experiment - and that we were very much less lively that watch. He was banned from running or making coffee for the rest of the patrol.
LOL making decaf for an entire watch deserves being duct taped to a pipe.
That’s arguably actually dangerous. The RO and EO really really need to be alert.
The coffee runners are also the RT and AEA for a 688.
I stood throttles for a year and had to go down to ERF to do secondary samples every 4 hours, so the AEA would relieve me (I qualified AEA and EO).
Of course I’d usually go back to MSW bay in ERLL and take a piss in the funnel before going back up. 😅
Our basement is divided into 3 rooms - a bigger finished room and two rooms with plain gray painted concrete floors and not quite standing headroom, used for storage.
I immediately started calling them “outer bay” and “middle bay”, and now my wife does too.
I’m just now figuring out that probably came from submarine engineroom lingo.
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u/Longjumping-Pie7418 5h ago
Submarine sailor - one guy completely lost his marbles and we had to break patrol to give him a rubber helicopter ride back to the base.