Photos of Russian Ship in Panama Canal

I found a few photographs of the Russian navy ship, the Admiral Chabanenko going through the Panama Canal. It was a night-time crossing and I think the pics are pretty nice. The links are below.

Reuters

Times of India Slide Show

Looked pretty cool. I went through The Ditch back in 1989. I thought it was a pretty big deal. We went through with a lot of security. I remember that we had a helicoptor or two with us the whole time and a few Boston Whalers equipped with big guns and filled with some pretty mean looking dudes. I was 20 years old at the time. Seeing all the security was the first time it was driven home for me that we were a serious military target and it was kind of a sobering experience for me.

Of course, I just loved the experience of going through the Panama Canal. It was definitely one of the more memorable days that I spent in the navy. Some pictures from navsource.org below show my first boat, the USS Shark (SSN-591) transiting the canal in '89. I don't know if I appear in any of these pictures, but I remember being on the fairwater planes while going through one of the locks. I really enjoyed being able to go out on the fairwater planes when we were on the surface. If you ask me, the classes of submarines without easy access to the fairwater planes really shortchange their sailors.

Picture 1

Picture 2

Picture 3

Update 11:00 p.m. : Looks like the links to the pics of my old boat may not be working. If you want to look, go to navsource.org and look at pics for the USS Shark (SSN-591). Sorry.

USS Nautilus and Submarine Memories

Today is the anniversary of the the commissioning of the USS Nautilus. She was commissioned on September 30, 1954.

USS Nautilus Commissioned at History.com

Now, I was stationed at the submarine base in Groton back in 1989. I spent about a year there and never once went to tour this historic ship. I can't think of a good reason why I never went to tour it. I guess the idea of going to look at another submarine while I had time off never appealed to me at the time, what with another submarine consuming nearly every waking hour of my life. Besides, my first boat, the USS Shark (SSN-591), was commissioned in 1961, so how different could it have been?

I do remember seeing the Nautilus many times. I remember one stretch of a few weeks where we were used as a training platform to prepare sea-returnee officers to moor a submarine. We would repeatedly get underway, go out into the Thames River, do a few donuts in the water near the Nautilus, and then come back and bump the pier, change officers, and do it all over again.

This might sound like a pretty good deal, what with not having to stay out at sea overnight, but think about how much it sucks to come in at about 4 am every single day to start up the reactor, getting underway and mooring over and over until about 1600, then shutting down after we brought shore power on. Those made for some long and miserable days.

It also had a few scary moments. I seem to remember parting a line on one trip, damaging a kleat on another occasion becuase of an improperly fastened line, and breaking some timber on the pier another time when we came in a little too fast. Think Driver's Education on Steroids. It was made even scarier for the topside line handlers. There just wasn't much room to move around on deck.

Pictures of my first boat at Navsource.com

In fairness, the ship handling characteristics of the Shark probably weren't very similar to the newer classes of submarines that most of these guys probably did their first tour on, and I am sure we had many uneventful moorings, but I only seem to remember the ones that scared the heck out of me.

What kind of stories do the rest of you have about unpleasant jobs (unclassified, of course) that your boat was assigned to do while you were in the Navy?