Thanks for the compliments!...I'm happy you liked it. Given that English is not my 1st language I didn't know wether simply describe what happened or write a story with it... its nice to know you enjoyed the reading!
Ducimus:
-I didn't know the "Local time" thing. Very useful!. However I was just N from Ireland, that would be GMT or GMT-1...so local time when I spotted the smoke was around 23:15 or 22:15. And I can tell you the "night" didn't feel like one at all... was very surprised with this.
-The draft advice. Well, if I understood it correctly the deeper an impact-fused torpedo hits, the more damage it causes. The plan was hitting any big merchants sitting at or near the mid-column of the convoy. All of them have drafts over 6 meters, so I felt safe setting 5m running depth.
Another consideration is that I really, and I **mean** really feared that with such a monster sea state the torpedos could "jump" out of a wave losing direction or even worse going off when hitting the next wave!!!!.
But when I spotted the CL just in front of my nose, I had no choice other than raising the running depth of my bow torpedoes to 3.5m and run any risk that setting would mean.
As it was one out of four torpedoes didn't explode and it was an almost 90 deg shot, that means that one of the eels didn't work. Never seen an impact torpedo not exploding after an almost perfect 90 degree impact, so I assumed the sea state had something to do with that miss.
-Good advice on how to using sound bearings when attacking a convoy...is one of the tricks I use when attacking one submerged.
However in this particular attack I wanted visual fixes before going deep. I could not do any mid-way visual check via periscope with that kind of seas (well, in fact I
could do it but I refused to, just in case half my submarine showed up between waves) so I got the fixes on the van ships of each colum and then orderd 25m.
When I moved to the F5 map, I plotted their course at map screen by using the radio information on the own convoy's course. I zoomed the map out so the convoy Icon would come up, drawed a line on the radio contact convoy icon that followed it's speed vector the best I could draw it, and then I extended it beyond my positing.
Then zoomed in the map view and drawed five paralell lines to the convoy's course, lines which started on each of the 5 visual contacts pictured on the map representing the van merchants on each colum. And then I erased the "convoy" line.
This way I had 5 paralell lines drawed on the map showing each column's course. As long as I didn't come up at or very near to any of those lines I would run no risk of colliding when coming back up (needless to say, sound contacts taken on my way in would also help with that. Coming in with a perfect 90º deviation from the convoys course,the contacts on stbd and port sides going from minus 90 and over 270 deg to over 90 and 270 respectively are dead giveaways of the fact you've just surpassed a column.)
This took mere seconds and gave me a good degree of certainty on where I could come up to PD for an attack, without having to do any more periscope fixes in my way in and so allowing my U-boat to infiltrate the convoy at a constant 25m depth.
Thanks all for the compliments, again