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Edited on Wed May-05-04 01:29 PM by rppper
a few of these will sound mean spirited, but if you'd have been there.....
1) seeing 3 russian ships...a udaloy class destroyer, vishna class intel ship and a kirov class cruiser (one of the scariest looking warships ever, btw) waiting 12.5 miles off of the coast of scotland for us to pass by them on our way out of holy loch. we had just recieved a new screw(prop)and they were taking sound cuts on us for id purposes. they were cutting anywhere from 200 to 300 yards of our bow and stern...bumper to bumper traffic in open water.....
2)the night time fire fights in montenegro during the kosovo blockade. we often saw dead bodies and dead animals floating by us during the day. we were also "attacked" by a gun running speed boat who saw our periscope and antenas. we saw the guys pointing at us as they swerved their boat to hit us. we dove before anything happened.
3) getting sh*tfaced drunk on a canadian frigate in puerto rico during the bills/redskins superbowl in the early 90's. our respective captains got into a drunken wrestling match after the game and fell over the side of the frigate, where they were soon joined by both crews...all in fun of course....
4)getting attacked by a mountain ape in gibralter. you can't hit back at them...it's illegal. something about a long standing agreement between the spanish and the uk......
5)taking two weeks of leave and circumnavigating the earth twice on air force cargo planes. i spent less than $150.00 and saw 12 different contries. never ride in a c141 without a heavy jacket, much less in shorts and a tank top.....
6)almost sinking...and not on purpose...due to a captain who insisted on running the diesel, submerged, in state 5 seas, when it was absolutly unessesary. the induction valve stuck open and caused several hundred tons of water to come into the people tank, shorting out all but 2 of the service fans and nearly destroying the diesel itself. oddly enough, we were directly over the remains of the uss scorpion, which mysteriously went down in the late 60's.
7)being topside while traveling the panama canal....i spent the first 5 years of my life in panama living by the sea wall in colon'. it was very sureal.....
8)during a dependants cruise, one of the chiefs wives slipped down under a table in the galley. we were doing angles and dangles...a series of 30 degree up and down depth changes. not unusual for someone to slip, but she wasn't a small woman either....a good 350lbs and all of about 5-2. we had to disassemble the table to get her out. i'm sure it was embarassing, but she was a real champ about it.
10)a boatwide prank pulled on our leading chief cook after he made liver and onions for the dinner meal...no one on the crew liked it except him, and a prank dealing with an incoming radio message about tainted liver and 20 or so apparently deathly ill crew members lying on the mess decks with IV tubes in them scared the living hell out of him...everyone on the boat was in on it from the CO down.
and an afterthought sea story.......
we had a navigator on my third sub who was notoriously hard to wake up. he was due to sign a daily report that had to go to the CO. we tried everything from shaking him to pouring water on him to wake him...all to no avail. finally, i went down to his stateroom, pulled back the curtain to his bunk and yelled, at the top of my lungs...."red sounding"(meaning we were in shallow water and were about to run aground...a death nod to a navigator). he sprang to life so quick that he hit his head on the bunk above him, knocking himself out cold in the process........
also, after hurricane andrew hit south florida, we were ordered to give assistance to any crippled vessel we contacted. we encountered a mid sized sailboat apparently adrift with no mast. we surfaced about 50 yards away from them, bore down on them and megaphoned an offer for assistance.. we then noticed the mast had been secured down. a chubby, smiling nude man and his nude wife rose up from the cabin and said thanks, but no thanks, and waved us on our merry way.....
edited due to memories....
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