If there is time, the Sonar Techs analyze the targets to determine what they are, freighter, tanker, trawler, another sub, and so on. Especially interesting targets are then further analyzed by the Sonar Supervisor, using more sophisticated equipment that breaks the incoming sound down into its component parts. This can often give very specific information about a ship, even — occasionally — its name.
The Skipper had made a command decision to stay away from the direct shipping lanes. This made the Sonar Techs' job a lot less hectic, but it made us easier to find in the quieter water away from the shipping lanes, where our sound would carry farther. So we needed to exercise more caution. The last thing we wanted was to be picked up by a Soviet fast attack and tracked to our destination. To help avoid this, the Skipper ordered that we clear our baffles once an hour. The baffles are that part of the after area of the sub that is shrouded by our own noise, so the Sonar Techs can't hear anything. The Officer of the Deck clears baffles by slowing the sub way down suddenly and turning it first left or right twenty degrees, and then the other way, while Sonar carefully checks to see if anything is back there.
The Skipper's Standing Orders said to clear baffles once an hour at random times, in random directions. This made it virtually impossible for a trailing submarine to anticipate our next move, and so made it very unlikely that such a sub would go undetected. But it sure slowed us down.
Also, we didn't take a direct route. Instead, we varied our course so that on average we would be moving toward our destination, but we drove long legs tandem to our base course. The entire process slowed us down tremendously, so that we were barely making five knots toward our target area.
This stretched our trip out to a full month… of tedious boredom, like I said. But not entirely.
One night about fifteen days into the voyage, I had the watch. Somehow we managed to stumble right into the middle of a Japanese fishing fleet. Sonar detected a huge factory ship, the type that stays at sea for months at a time, and a whole lot of small trawlers. Within ten minutes I was completely overwhelmed with targets on my tracking screen, and I could only imagine what Sonar was dealing with in the Sonar shack. Every few seconds Sonar hit me with another contact. In less than ten minutes we had designated over twenty-five contacts. Apparently we had come up on the factory ship to the north, and did not initially detect the rest of the fishing fleet to the south. I turned a bit south to remain fully clear of the factory ship, and almost immediately found myself in the midst of the trawler fleet — and that's significant, because trawlers drag long trawl nets behind them, at depths up to 150 feet or more.
I slowed down to a crawl, and called the Skipper by sound-powered phone to tell him what was going on. He decided to get up and come to Control for a while, since the situation was a bit dicey. Just as he entered the Conn, all hell broke loose.
The first thing was a shudder we all felt throughout the entire sub. Almost immediately, Maneuvering called me on the squawk box, reporting heavy current draw, and a sudden strong resistance on both shafts.
"All stop!" I ordered, to stop the screws from turning, and instructed Ballast Control to put the sub into hover, "Maintain two-hundred feet." And then as an afterthought, "Stand by to use thrusters."
Pots had the BCP. I ordered him to find Senior Chief Gunty to relieve him so he could get back to Maneuvering to help out.
The Skipper sat down in his chair, a padded, raised executive seat at the back of the conning station. He didn't interfere, but I was keenly aware that he was right behind me, ready to jump in if I did anything he didn't like.
"Reactor Scram! Reactor Scam!"
That was all I needed. A reactor scram is when all the control rods drop into the reactor core, effectively shutting the reactor down. It's an automatic safety measure that absolutely protects an overloaded reactor from any damage. But it also shuts it down completely, and that immediately shuts down the turbine's steam supply, which also immediately shuts down the generators, and everything else run directly or indirectly by the reactor. That left me with only the diesel engines and the battery.
For obvious reasons we couldn't run the diesels at 200 feet, and I didn't think the Skipper wanted to surface in the middle of the fishing fleet. Besides, we were clearly hung up on something.
"Shift to emergency power, battery," I ordered, glad that I had already sent Pots back to Maneuvering.
Throughout the sub, most of the lights went out, and emergency lights powered up, driven by the large lead-acid batteries built under the Control Room deck.
"Avoid all unnecessary movement about the ship," I announced over the 1MC loudspeaker system. Gunty was going to have enough trouble maintaining the propulsionless hover without having to compensate for people moving about the sub.
I answered the sound-powered phone's shrill burr. "It's Dirk, Mac. Here's the plant status."
"Hold a moment," I interrupted. Let me get the Skipper on line. I motioned for the Skipper to pick up the sound-powered handset by his chair.
"Captain," he said calmly.
"Here's the plant status, Sir. We pulled a terrific strain on the port shaft, and loaded down the starboard shaft as well. Can't see any inside damage, but don't know for sure yet. Still investigating. The lopsided strain cascaded back through the system, setting off the Scram. There appears to be no damage. I'll give you a follow-on report as soon as we know more."
The Skipper replaced the handset and asked, "Well, what do you think, Mac?"
"The Von Steuben caught a deep tow cable coming out of the Med several years ago — right after I got my commission." I paused, reflecting on that event, and comparing it to now. "But this is different. I think we snagged a trawl net. With that Can on our stern, we certainly have enough places it could hang up."
The Skipper nodded in agreement.
"We probably snagged a really deep one. When they realized they were snagged, and they obviously couldn't shake it loose, they probably dropped or cut their tow lines. They had nearly everything out anyway. I think one or both the steel tow cables wrapped around the port shaft, jamming it, and then wrapped around the starboard shaft, but didn't actually bind it." I started to picture the consternation and panic on the Japanese trawler. "If they have any smarts," I added, "they probably figure they caught a sub."
The Engineer called back to tell us that there appeared to be no damage. But he could not test the shafts until he got the reactor back on line, and that was going to take another hour.
"Skipper," I said, "we're not going anywhere. Let's deploy the Basketball to examine what really happened. Then I can send my guys out to cut off anything caught on the Can, and clear the shafts.
The Skipper thought it over for a minute or two.
"Make it so," he said. "Captain has the Deck and the Conn. Batman to Control."
"Batman" was the nickname of Special Operations Officer, Lieutenant Commander Lonie Franken-Ester, so called because he was in charge of the Bat Cave, the forward compartment that had been the cruise missile launch facility in an earlier incarnation of Halibut. He was also in charge of deploying and manipulating the Basketball — a basketball-size camera-carrying remotely operated vehicle (ROV). Live images were sent to the Display Room in the Bat Cave, and they could also be seen on the Control monitor and in the Dive Locker.