Ports O' Call

Each year the Navy required active vessels to undergo "at sea" training. During my 3 years on the Fulton, we went to Puerto Rico twice. And Halifax Nova Scotia once.  My first trip was to PR. 

On the way down from New London, just past Key West we saw a container floating in the sea lanes. It looked like the container had fallen off a container ship passing through that area. We used this opportunity to practice weapons training. 

We surmised that the container was full of beef, or some sort of meat, because there were many sharks circling around it. They were attracted to the blood leaking from the container. We shot at the sharks while trying to put enough holes in the container to sink it. We were woefully unsuccessful in this attempt. We reported the object to the Coast Guard as a shipping hazzard and continued down to San Juan PR.

San Juan the first time

My first visit to San Juan was cool. We tied up to a pier, and subs started docking with us for re-supply. 

Each year the US Navy subs, and British, and Spanish subs would participate in mock war games called Operation Springboard. 

During the games our subs would track the opposition force subs, and fire dummy weapons at them.

Dummy torpedoes had water-filled warheads instead of high explosives used on live weapons.  Once a torp got close to its target, and was considered a hit, the water in the war head was expelled by compressed gas, and the torp would float up to the surface and a locator radio beacon would start transmitting.  The firing sub would recover the torp and bring it back to us to be serviced, and then be sent back out to another sub.  

Our job was to recharge the batteries that propelled the fish (this is what we called torpedoes), pull the performance tapes, analyze them, and write a report on the performance to be kept by the sub crew, and we would keep a copy of each fish's performance for our records.  Sometimes we would find a weapon’s performance started to deteriorate.  We would change out the failing part, test the new part and send it back out.