All right, I'll tell you this and no more - I'm legless already.
Took out 4 single merchants while transiting the chanel from BF 31 to BF25, on our way to our patrol 5's assigned grid at BF17. Never got there. Here's why.
Alerted to Large convoy transiting BF13, ran intercept and caught them in BF14. Only getting one hydrophone return for warship, and no outliers, so a large convoy, virtually unprotected. I was dead in their line of travel, so I dove to 120m on the same bearing as the convoy, on silent, and went all stop until the escort passed overhead.
Now that i was in his baffles, I ordered periscope depth at ahead standard, then slow as "Ears" detected another warship astern at long range. This had me at periscope depth in the middle of the first 5 wide row of Tankers & Merchants.
But the real prize was in the second row. I armed all T1's with Impact/Fast at 2m, selected 1-4 Salvo at 10 deg spread and came hard right at ahead standard to engage. The target was that second warship that I had thought may have been a trailing escort. Nah. It was only a 31,000 ton Revenge Class (the Ramillies) loping along at 6 knotts in the middle of the 2nd row!
We got around square and let rip. Three conected, with the 4th taking out a Med Merc on the far side. I hit a first column Large Merc with my stern tube before heading back to the depths on the reciprocal bearing to the convoy.
As the strikes were on both wings and the middle of the pack, the escort was clueless as to where to look, so it was easy to go 'doggo' until they were out of range. I came off silent, surfaced, reloaded (including external stores as the weather was so good), and headed off in persuit.
5 hours later, I let loose with single torps into a Modern Tanker, a Tanker and a bunch of Med Merchants. The whole convoy had changed course once re-forming and three hours later, on a dark night, I came 500m alongside the on-fire Modern Tanker and put him down with the deck gun.
I repeated this trick with an on-fire Med Merc an hour later, but this time the J&K escort got close enough to engage us. We danced for a while, with me luring him into a perfect submerged dead-astern chase with us firing a text-book stern tube Mag shot at him at 600 m. Of course the useless thing failed to detonate, so we had some fun before I out turned him after one of his attack runs to get him side-on with an imact.
Then we had some more fun with the last of our torps and then using the deck gun to put down all those that had been previously hit (including the Large Merc that we got in the very first engagement). Then we took out some Intermediate Tankers with the last of our rounds (I didn't want to only wound a larger Merc - no point).
Finally, just to rub their noses in it, we took out a whole lot of deck cargo with our flack gun from under 100 m. A couple tried to ram us, but we had had our fun, so broke off in BF15, 12 hours after commencing the engagement.
Had some near misses on he way back home through The Ditch, but arrived home on the 7th of Dec for our shortest cruise ever (a week & a half) with unscathed crew and hull, for 13 ships and 96093 tons. If only the Brits would keep sending out such convoys!
This floor is comfortable. Or I'm comfortably numb. Think I'll just stay here for a while. That must mean, by Peacock's definition, I quit, quietly, quite drunk, thank you.
"Not drunk is he who from the floor
Can rise along and still drink more
But drunk is he who prostrate lies
Without the power to drink or rise."