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"Tacking on your dolphins". Well here is a practice that I think the new navy might have forsaken. When a squid earned his dolphins it was customary to place the pins over the left upper chest area and then the qualified crew lined up and literally punched the exposed pins into the chest of the newly submarine qualified sailor. I had purple and yellow bruising on my chest for a long time after I got mine. If the boat was in port then sometime a stein or other large glass was filled with beer and the dolphins were dropped in the glass and you had to chug the brew and retrieve your dolphins with your teeth. Saw a couple of light weights pass out doing that one. Funny though, for some reason I never witnessed an officer going through this. Hmmmm!:hmm: Okay Bill, what is the scoop with the officers? Also, I simply cannot tell you what was done with a sailor if he earned them and we were in a port that had "ladies of the night". The material is far to graphic, but I will leave it to your Imagination....:arrgh!:

When we had to "Drink our Dolphins", they would put almost anything in the mug. Barbeque sauce, tobassco sauce, salsa, beans, corn, etc. Almost everybody ended up puking all over the place. This was in the 70's.

Back to the Mediterranean Sea... We used to call othe Med. our front yard and the Barents Sea our backyard, I guess because those were our homes away from home. Well, I guess we received Comms. to go check out a Soviet Sub tender parked right smack dap in the middle of the Med. This was interesting to me because the U.S. Tenders usually are parked pierside somewhere. Not the Soviets! They take em and do their thing in open seas. We struck Gold. Tied up to the tender if memory serves me right was a Victor and a Charlie class. It was broad daylight and we had our #2 scope set up with a video feed and a monitor placed above our fire control and one in the crews mess out of all places. We ran a few passes under the subs doing "underhull surveys". One Chief commented and said, "This is more fun than looking up a gals skirt..." It was impressive to be able to see what the CO was seeing and recording through #2 scope. The Skipper raised the elevation of the scope to check out the tender and we saw a bunch of Soviet sailors near the stern frantically making obscene gestures at us. This was astonishing because we could see them from about 95 to 100 feet under the water. That is how good the resolution was and how clear the waters of the Med are. They could see us clear as a bell. The next thing to happen was a lot of active Sonar and a surface craft of some sort was steaming our way fast, so deep we went and hid several miles away. We did this again a day later, only this time one of the Subs had deployed by then. I actually tried making a single mission like this. but dang if I know how to get a sub to just sit still. Anyway, I hope they felt violated by us American Sub voyeur's:yep:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bubblehead Nuke

Long time no see TopTorp.

I have been wondering how long till you drop in here.

How you been doing?

Staying busy. I drop by once and a while to see what's happening. I like the forum. It keeps me in touch with the community.

TT

Yeah, "tacking on" is gone. We still pin crows good and proper, though. (Giving the new petty officer insignia of a guy who just made rate a good hard sock.)

Was talking to a couple guys off the Hawk - apparently they used to do the tacking on without the frogs for the wings. Called it blood wings, for obvious reasons.

Makes me kind of glad to be a tin can sailor, actually, though also glad to be getting out before ADM Mullen's notions destroy all of the Navy I joined... when you can have an FCCS who genuinely thinks a working fuse is an open, there's a problem.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kurulham

This really calls for word by word translation .. :D

Yeah ... he kinda lost me after "Good Morning" ... LOL
I do kinda get the gist of what he is trying to say but I'd be hard pressed to explain any details.

OK Ping Jockey and neptune let hear some....:D

Okay, I'll throw one in here.

There we were, at 300 fathoms....

This concerns a middy cruise. (For those who don't know, middy would be Midshipman. Midshipman are assigned to ships between there junior and senior years. These guys do UI watches. (UI-Under Instruction of a qualified watch stander).

Well, we had this one who thought he was just hot s---, so it was decided to bring him back to reality. This guy was the on-coming DOW UI. (The COB was the actual DOW and was in on this. So was the Capt.) We found the smallest qualified crew member aboard, gave him a squirk bottle with water and had him climb up behind the SCP and into the overhead above the SCP.

The middy comes up and relieves the DOW (UI). The Capt decides to make this fun, so he assumes the CONN and orders the DOW to take the boat to test depth. (middy had not been to test depth yet)

The usual orders are given and we start down to test depth. About half way down, our guy on the overhead squirts the middy. He looks around and says nothing. Again he gets squirted, looks around and no else notices so he says nothing. (remember, everyone in Control knows and sees whats going on.)

Again, our accomplice squirts the middy and the middy looks around and up but does nothing.

Finally getting tired of this, our guy in the overhead removes the squirt top from the bottle and dumps the water right on the middys head. Without any though, the middy stands up, screams "Flooding in the Control Room" and runs out of Control. Everyone busts a gut, including the CAPT.

When the middy didn't here the 1MC call, he knew he'd been had and sheepishly returns to Control where the CAPT preceeded to rip him up one side and down the other for leaving his post during a casualty.

(He did return to boats after receiving his commision, but not to us.)

:rotfl: Pride goes before a fall....:arrgh!:

Ahhh.. the middies.

Fun time to be had by all.

We had one. He was CONVINCED that you had to be gay to ever go to sea on a sub. WHY he came on a middie cruise on a sub I will never know.

Anyway, here he was on the mess decks going on about how you must be gay to serve on one of these things due to the lack of women when all of the sudden a buddy of mine reaches across the table and feeds me some of his food. You know, the 'here dear try this' thing.

This guys sees it and stops DEAD in the middle of his speech. I return the favor to my buddy and continue eating....

It was like blood in the water folks. This guy was shaken and the rest of the guys saw it.

Soon after, people make a SHOW of holding hands when around this guy. The snickering was GREAT. This guy was a SCREAMING homophobe and here the crew is 'showing its feelings' after a week or two at sea.

He went to his sea daddy who happened to be the MPA and told him what was going on. The feedback we got put us in tears. The MPA just shot us a sour look and told us he didn't like the guy anyway. He told the MPA that he felt that the enlisted guys were basically stupid scum for not going to college when he first came onboard.

We wanted to correct his misunderstandings. We actually sat around and PLANNNED things to do to this guy. Someone once said that the most dangerous thng in the Navy is a bored nuke. Well, we planned to prove it.

We made sure to do things only when the more 'responsible' folks were not around. We set out to send this guy over the edge however I remember that two of the torpedomen put on one hell of a show (they were brother in laws btw) that REALLY sent this guy over the edge.

When we pulled into port and this guy was off the boat like a cannon shot. I can only imagine what his buddies thought when he tried to relay what he did for the summer.

This is the real world of life on a boat. These guys will learn a valuable lesson on proper submarine 'etiquette'. :up:

Now I appreciate the difference between reality and game even more ! :arrgh!:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bubblehead Nuke

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dr.Sid

In Czech we have a phrase 'submarine disease' which does not seem to have equivalent in English. It is used for the state when several people has to live together in small space and due to lack of privacy they tend to dislike and hate each other. The way someone sneeze, the way someone throws his towel on the floor .. and you find yourself wanting to kill the other guy.

Some say this will be serious trouble for interplanetary flights. Now back to topic.

It's perfectly clear now after Frame57's stories where this term come from, right !? :rotfl:

PS: funny enough, we don't have sea or navy, much less submarine force :o

I actually found that confines of a submarine created an increased sense of tolerance. There are things that would drive you start raving MAD if you had the ability to leave a situation. When you are stuck in the 'sewer pipe', you had to learn to deal with problems. Coping skills became a highly developed thing.

You knew more about someone than their spouse did. They told you things, and you told them things that you would NEVER talk about to anyone else. EVER.

I became great friends of people, that had I met in other circumstances, I would have either ignored or is some cases walked across the street to avoid. It is the exposure to the varieties of life and lifestyles that tends to make you more tolerant. It gave you a forced introspective look at what YOU did and how others percieved you. This gave you a better ability to look at things from someone elses perspective and maybe lead to a little more understanding.

Was there friction? You betcha. Was there fights?? Oh yes. I had my share of throw down/drag out bare knuckle fights. You know what? After we got done beating the crap out of each other we would realize that what we arged over was damn petty and feel stupid. Then we would go out for a beer and/or a lapdance.

That same person who you fought with three weeks ago had your back when things went down somewhere else. You NEVER left a shipnmate in a fight unless he was a total dumbass and ignored all the warnings you gave him. Then you just let him get stomped on a little and break it up before any real harm is done.

Later in life, I find that very little bothers me. I seemed to have developed my own 'bubble' I guess. Unless you FORCE me to attempt participation in something I dislike, I can pretty much tune it out. It drives my wife LOONEY.

Back to what you called a space problem? I do not think it will be as much a problem as people think. The dynamics of a small crew are well understood and there are tests that can be adminstered to determine compatibility of crew members.

I agree with this, well except the lapdance part. I would never give a shipmate a lapdance but I guess your boat was different.:lol: