Your “It’s 4 O’Clock Somewhere” NFL Football Open Thread

In order to keep this website safe, here’s another submarine story. I hope these don’t bore you.

This is the “hall of mirrors” story.

We were a “northern boat” trained and designed to operate in the upper North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans.

Sometimes our boat would have ice in it, but that’s a different story.
So on our 40 day patrol we would leave our base at King’s Bay Georgia and hit our dive point and head north.

That’s where we wanted to be.

The Gulf Stream is a very warm ocean current that flows up the Atlantic seaboard all the way to England. The Labrador current flows south and is ice cold, and the two currents meet off of Newfoundland, where my mother is from, and the two currents swirl together.

But this is the “sweet spot” for a submarine. This is the “hall of mirrors.”

We were being tracked by five different navies, and we could outsmart every single one of them.

Surface ships could only track us by sound, primarily engine noise. So we would get in the Labrador/Gulf mix (warm and cold) and all underwater sound waves went haywire, to our advantage.

In the “hall of mirrors” the sound would be deflected (or “bent”) due to temperature and salinity changes and interfaces. We constantly measured this. Nothing was what it seemed to be, but we knew how to use it.

Can you hear us? Do you think we are over here? No, we’re actually over there.

The sound would bend, just like in a hall of mirrors. They never knew where we were.

Meanwhile, we are downstairs drinking coffee and watching movies. We knew what we were doing.

But we knew where they were, and believe you me we were locked on to them with our 48s (Mk 48 torpedoes), and we would usually just quietly slip away, while the surface ships were still searching for ghosts.