Tweet
Question, I know that marine bio fouling takes place on the outside of the hull but was wondering if it also takes place inside the ballast tanks and if so what problems that creates? If so are they serviceable? Subs get nasty on the outside so I would think they get nasty on the inside as well.
-
-
Ugh! Don't know why I was thinking about in the first place but it just occurred to me that they could get fouled too. Sounds horrible!Comment
-
No algal growth for the lack of sunlight but one would expect barnacles, mussels and other sea creatures that make any hard surface their home.Make it simple, make strong, make it work!Comment
-
-
As soon as a drydock basin is pumped down with a boat on the blocks, the lower Main Ballast Tank gratings are opened and hang 90 degrees by their hinges. Ventilation is set up and the air is checked daily for toxic gas. No entry tag matching the current date, and you don't dare enter the tank. Tank cleaners climb in with hydroblasters and begin flushing the interior (painted white in most cases) removing the loose critters and getting the mud out. Lighting is installed and scaffolding if a job requiring it is needed.
All hydrophones and transducers that meet failure criteria that have been waiting for a drydocking replacement get changed out. The spherical array inside the sonar dome usually has a bunch of phones to come out and a complex set of scaffolding is erected around it.
The interior is about three stories high, so it's like being in a very large, smooth-walled cave, lit up with strands of wire mesh-covered lights. It smells like hell in the summer and not much better in the winters. When it's that cold and damp in there, the lighting is the only source of heat. To get to the scaffolding surrounding the array is lots of fun.
One enters through a square opening forward of the escape trunk and make your way forward and down as the hull tapers, passing the hydrophone splice trunk. This is the area where phones and ducers are spliced electrically, but they still need to be taken off the mounting studs wherever they're located.
Continuing forward and down, you crawl on your hands through mud (if the area is fully cleaned, and it rarely is) and knees through a bulkhead to a three-foot hole with a ladder that goes down, and then inwards, following the inner curve of the array - you're climbing down with your feet angled about where your knees should be, hanging onto the slimy rungs, hoping you don't slip and fall twenty feet, to the bottom of the dome, which is also open at the bottom. (The array looks like a hollow sphere with the top and bottom ends removed. The end removed on top is where you climb in. The array mount is suspended by a big honkin lip welded to the forward pressure hull.) The first couple of times you negotiate the backwards ladder are pretty unnerving, but like the stench, you get used to it. It's common to have at least one rescue drill each drydocking to get a "victim" out via stokes stretcher.
Anyway, these jobs were always fun to take brand-new apprentices on. We'd scurry down the top of the array, backwards into the darkness and wait for them. None of them followed without a long hesitation, at the top muttering, "You have GOT to be ****ting me!" when they see the angle of the ladder. More than once, I'd let out a whoop and jump to the side, sliding down the contour of the dome, hoping there wasn't something at the bottom - like a dead apprentice. This usually had the effect of freaking them out anyway. Then you'd laugh and they'd slowly climb down.
Once the elements were replaced, and the old cable cut out and new ones mounted and banded securely, the next stop on the job was the splice trunk, lit by daylight streaming through the top entry hole. The 2' diameter bundles of hydrophone cables was always covered in the most foul-smelling scum I've every encountered. We used to call it, "The scum of the earth" or, "Satan's diarrhea." It had the consistency of mud and quickly dried on your skin and coveralls, ensuring no one would sit anywhere near you on the bus ride back to the shop.
The interior of the turtleback is white, but nothing as nasty as the dome or MBTs, where we also had many hydrophones.
Barnacle growth is minimal. But accumulated critters are plentiful. The drydock basin usually had a few sharks in the bottom after draining.
Towed arrays were serviced on a twenty foot-high platform lowered into the basin by crane. The arrays would be pushed out with seawater and we inspected them after rolling them onto huge reels that were pneumatically operated and then slowly pulling them back into the boat while we inspected them on a long roller platform. At Bangor, this was not a bad job on a good day, but in the winter while it's pouring down buckets of rain, it was miserable. I quickly graduated to leading the job and sat in the handling room forward of sonar, operating the handling systems and communicating via walkie-talkie to the rest of the team, coordinating the event. Fun times.Last edited by CC Clarke; 02-05-2022, 07:53 AM.Comment
-
Man! To hear about this is rather interesting to say the least. This is the gory part of servicing a submarine which sounds much more involved than I had ever imagined from the images of blasting a hull exterior clean. Thank you for the detailed walk through.Comment
-
David,
Were you playing in the Potable Water tanks again??? Slimiest, nastiest things I've ever been in!!! Worse than the poop tanks!!! Second Class Turd Diver, Extraodinaire,
BillComment
-
No, but what you describe accounts for my aversion of the boats scuttlebutt. Bug-juice at least killed the taste. A trick the forward room LPO taught us was before entering the WRT tank was to pour some yeast into the thing the day before popping the access plate. Talk about a counter-intuitive move! He's also the guy who taught the TM gang how to use Wonder Bread to filter out the pink-lady from our stores of MK14 alcohol. The cooks never understood why the boat ran out of store-bought bread so quick once underway.Last edited by He Who Shall Not Be Named; 02-05-2022, 11:41 AM.Who is John Galt?Comment
-
I bet that smells like an outhouse on a tuna boat with the temps around 90.“Of the 40,000 men who served on German submarines, 30,000 never returned.”Comment
-
For those of you that may have seen my reply to this post, I do apologize! It was not appropriate!
Especially when I think about the responsibility that I had on occasion to break the news to the family members...
Rob
"Firemen can stand the heat"Last edited by rwtdiver; 02-06-2022, 01:48 PM.Comment
Comment