OT - I Work w/ A Sub Veteran...
 

...who served on the USS Seapoacher (SS-406).

Not making this up. I recieved "Silent Victory" from Amazon today and I was showing it to a co-worker who was in the Navy. To my surprise he told me that he served on the USS Seapaocher - a Balao class sub - in the early 80's.

:o











How is that even possible you might ask? Well his name is Diego and he served in the PERUVIAN navy before he emigrated to the US.

I looked it up and sure enough the Seapoacher was sold to Peru in 1975 and served until 1995 as the La Pedrera. :o

Talk about built to last! :up:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Sea_Poacher_(SS-406)#BAP_La_Pedrera_.28S-49.29

Barkhorn.

:o:oA couple of these.

well im not actually that surprised but that is neat.:up:

America or I should say the USN gave away a lot of old boats after WWII ...

They even gave a WWII war submarine that made a war patrol against Japan to Japan ... Figure that one out.

I was at Mare Island in San Francisco, in the yards on the USS Salmon SS-573 back in the mid 60's, when the Navy was finishing up a fram II WWII boat for the Turkish navy ... the crew was crazy.

I mean regular submarine sailors are crazy, but these guys would take the boat out and dive leaving one of the deck hatches open. They would have to come back up, close the hatch and take her down again.

Plus if one of the Turkish sailors got in trouble ashore, you know misbehaving or showing disrespect for their countries uniform, they would just take the boat out past the three mile limit and hang the guy.

That must have been quite the surprise indeed!

:|\\

Served until 1995?!

Thats insane :o

now thats what i call a work horse! 51 yrs of service!!

I have said this before in another thread, but this one made me think of it again. A few months ago I had a chane to talk to a retired vet that served on the HMS Haida http://www3.sympatico.ca/hrc/haida/

Although I only spoke to him briefly, some of his stories were amazing. He was a sound operator.

Anyway great thread here:up:

I wonder if she is broken up for scrap. Perhaps she lies in some scrapyard.

It says in Wikkipedia that the Sea Poacher is now used by Peru for dockside training.

Reallydedpoet's post about the HMCS Haida vet reminded me... Years ago I got talking to a WWII veteran who served on another Canadian destroyer, the Restigouche or "Rusty Guts" as the sailors called her. Anyway, the vet I ran into was also a sound man. He said that they would get exhausted and sleep-deprived during the convoys, and the watches sitting in the asdic (British WWII term for sonar) room were so dull that the guys on watch would doze off occasionally... Of course, when a guy fell asleep on watch he would stop turning the wheel that allowed him to sweep the asdic beam back and forth to look for subs.

Apparently there was a repeater on the bridge that moved to tell them what bearing the asdic was searching... When the asdic guy nodded off, sometimes the officer on the bridge would notice that the needle on the repeater had stopped moving and call down the voice-pipe to see what was up. The snoozing asdic guy would wake with a guilty start, and then they would claim to have been investigating a suspicious noise on that bearing so they wouldn't get in trouble for falling asleep!

I guess if you get tired enough even fear of death won't always keep you awake...

The vet from the Haida spoke about some of the heavy seas, about the Haida shuddering up some mountainious wave, then going down into the valley of sea below, then doing it all over again, and again, all while trying to do his duty. Remarkable stuff.