Credo
"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." -- John Paul Jones
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Caesar and Cleopatra"
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friedrich Nietzsche
"A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."--Edmund Burke
"Μολὼν λαβέ" -- Leonidas
"Blogito Ergo Sum" -- Neptunus Lex
That sort of thing can never happen in our Navy, can it? Was there not a similar incident with USS-SF?
That sort of thing can never happen in our Navy, can it? Was there not a similar incident with USS-SF? It was a chart selection matter IIRC. One hart in the lockercontained INFO on the seabed obstruction. We took the wrong chart, and it cost one sailor his life.
Lex,
It’s impolite to embarass your friends. We can do that all by ourselves, doh!
“. . . a training exercise for students” As I recall, this happened during what the Brits call “Perisher,” their version of prospective CO training. I wonder if the PCO who had the conn at the time passed the course? Perisher used to be a zero defects training course. A single failure in any exercise and you packed your bags. They usually have a very high failure rate. Something like 50%. Our own PCO courses are much more forgiving.
We put tracing paper on our charts too. I remember seeing the QM’s with charts and paper spread on the table on the mess deck. They did tracings of the coast line and other areas and colored them in various colors while watching a movie. I didn’t realize that it was all just to save money. Hmmph!
We put tracing paper on our charts in the ASWMOD, too, but we had clear acetate on order before I transfered. Oh, and nobody counted on us for navigation…
We used transparent plastic overlays for fixes on anchor watches. Taking fixes in the same area on a chart for 4 days tends to put a bit wear on the chart. My next ship the Navigator thought that was a good idea, but the QMC had been stationed at Gitmo and said that was against NavRegs.
When in open ocean plotting sheets are usually used. It has a Lat/Long grid and nothing else. You pencil in the Lat and Long. When you are a thousand miles from anything and the nearest land is 2 miles straight down, a chart is meaningless. In coastal areas, it’s a much different story. Tracing paper is a bad idea.
SJBill – yes, the San Fran grounded in 05, albeit for very different reasons.
This is interesting, since it did happen during Perisher Ops. But it happened in 2002. You can read the entire report here.
The real problems that contributed to this grounding were not the tracing paper, but the failure to adequately take into account set and drift caused be excessive tides when conducting a submerged transit through a channel.
The report states the plan the students had come up with (standard procedure for Perisher Ops) was for the transit to occur at Periscope Depth, with constant position information and slow speeds. When the plan was changed to submerged, 8 kt transit, the plan was no longer adequate with regard to margin of safety.
Overall, because of their poor calculations, they failed to take into account a current of 3.4 kts, instead assuming it was 1.5 kts. The difference is huge, especially when you’re adjusting for turns in tight channels.
Regarding the tracing paper. We use it in the US Navy as well. Can it cover important information? not the stuff we use, as long as you are during more than a cursory glance at the chart, you’ll be able to see everything on the chart. In this case, the board added the comment about tracing paper because it appeared to obscure the sounding curves somewhat, and the duty CO (the student in charge at the time) was placing false faith in soundings as an indicator on when to turn the ship. The obscurity of soundings may have helped, but the real problem was the currents and not taking them into account. Soundings are just not an accurate way to fix ships position on the fly, trust me on this.
Just my thoughts.
This reminds me.
I’d better fill up the car with the four dollar a gallon gas before I run out and have to pay for a tow truck.
Liz – Depending on tank size, tow truck might be cheaper.
QMaster
He bought a large map,
representing the sea,
without the least vestige of land.
And the crew were quite pleased,
when they found it to be,
a map they could all understand.