A most unusual picture taken of the USS Independence.....

Navy Chief

Navy Chief

Senior Member
I'd never seen this picture before. It is of the USS Independence, which is not that unusual, except the view is from periscope of the USS Batfish (SSN 681)! Circa 1992

NC
 
My worst fear come true right there. At least it was a friendly. Whenever I am out there I always wonder who could be watching from below.
 
Always heard that there's two kinds of ships... Submarines and targets.
 
It's OK the cross hairs are too high. The torpedo would fly over the deck and miss. :)
 
Willy said:
Always heard that there's two kinds of ships... Submarines and targets.
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Know of the quote but wouldn't it be "There's one kind of ship.... Targets." as Submarines are Submarines not ships?
 
My dad would go on long exercises in the 1970's where they would play cat and mouse with submarines and chase each other all over the North Atlantic for days at a time.
I think the subs usually won.
 
We had a CMC (Command Master Chief) in VFA-83 who was "old" Navy; a Bosun's Mate. If anyone would refer to a aircraft carrier as a "boat" instead of a ship, he would correct them, INSTANTLY!

NC
 
There are still people in the Navy like that today NC. Our last CMC was a sub-mariner. He did not take kindly to the "bubblehead" talk. In my current squadron though it seems acceptable that a lot of people from carrier life refer to the small boys as boats as to them the only real ship is a carrier.

As far as the cat and mouse games go the submarines always win.. When you have a small ship dragging an active sonar drogue behind it, and a helicopter dropping a bunch of buoys all over the ocean (which the sub can hear all of this by the way). They always know where we are at, and we are left pretty much figuring out the area's they are not. It is most of the time game over for us before it ever really even begins. It is a testament to our technology though. I am curious once we start taking these new MH-60R's on deployment if that will be any kind of game changer for these exercises.
 
Roadburner440 said:
There are still people in the Navy like that today NC. Our last CMC was a sub-mariner. He did not take kindly to the "bubblehead" talk. In my current squadron though it seems acceptable that a lot of people from carrier life refer to the small boys as boats as to them the only real ship is a carrier.

As far as the cat and mouse games go the submarines always win.. When you have a small ship dragging an active sonar drogue behind it, and a helicopter dropping a bunch of buoys all over the ocean (which the sub can hear all of this by the way). They always know where we are at, and we are left pretty much figuring out the area's they are not. It is most of the time game over for us before it ever really even begins. It is a testament to our technology though. I am curious once we start taking these new MH-60R's on deployment if that will be any kind of game changer for these exercises.
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The funniest story I can remember from being on a carrier, was when one of our pilots "accidentally on purpose" dropped a practice bomb in the wake of a Krivak class Russian destroyer that was shadowing our carrier. It darn near started an international incident. This was back in the Cold War era. The pilot, LCDR "Hoggy" Monroe, just felt like screwing with the Russkies. They would follow the carriers, about 2 miles or so behind the ship.

NC
 
Sounds similar to what happened in our HSL community a few years back when a pilot thought it would be a good idea to drop an active buoy on one of our submarine's. Needless to say his flying career was short lived. I have heard the story about that Russian destroyer. People still talk about that incident to this day.
 
Happens.

026524.jpg

http://www.navsource.org/archives/02/65b.htm

Shot from a german navy type 206A.
 
Bjoern your hotlink did not work. Had to jump over to navsource to see it.
 
More Ruskie Sea Stories

Well, To add to all the drama that the Russian Navy is capable of,
On a Med cruise on the Forresal (HS-3) it was during our unrep that one of the many
russian frigates came along our port side (so close that you could of thrown a bottle
of vodka at them). Their main deck was loaded with what looked to be their
whole crew taking pictures of us as they glided along side of us then those S*B's got
ahead of us and cut a starboard turn in the path of us and the oiler to our starboard. We had to make emergency
breakaway. We went to port, the oiler to starboard. We launched the alert 5 helo and that little so and so ship was buzzed numerious times. Kinda like the road rage you see on the freeways.BTW
VFA 83 was with us but was known as VA-83 (A7) and VA-81.
A Russian sub was tracking us too and and dawns early light, launched a practice torp at us and hit our stern
and created this huge green ball of light. Scary stuff.
 
AZ1USN said:
A Russian sub was tracking us too and launched a practice torp at us and hit our stern
and created this huge green ball of light. Scary stuff.
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Really risky stuff launching a practice torpedo I would think. How did your commander know it was a practice shot while it was homing? Or was he just hoping it wasn't a live fire?
 
stansdds said:
Really risky stuff launching a practice torpedo I would think. How did your commander know it was a practice shot while it was homing? Or was he just hoping it wasn't a live fire?
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When it all happened, I didn't know what to think so, I went to my Ready Room and
found out from one of our helo pilots that just came back from ASW run. I would think
if we did the same thing to one of their surface skimmers that all hell would of broke loose.
I know that the SHIP's CO made announcement over the IMC (Pa system) and told
us what happened. He even made the comment "we have learned a lot from all of this and
and the Russians". Strange but true. Don't know if that ship CO (Captain) ever made Admiral after all that.
This all happened back in 80/81 Med Cruise when our two embarked A7 squadrons (VA-81 /VA 83) paid Kadaffi
a visit to his Tent before we sailed back to Mayport.
 
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