Poor seamanship: a lesson learned

[MKalafatas]

Alternative thread titles:

Bungle in the Banda Sea
Don't Lose the Wind Gage in Your S-boat!

TMO/RSRCD, my first career. 2nd patrol in the S-boat. Left Surabaya in Feb '42 with orders for the Molucca Sea. Two weeks in an S-boat is a long time. To patrol, you must use sonar. To use sonar you must dive. To travel, you must surface. It is tedious, always diving and surfacing, always wondering how many hours you may afford to use time compression without checking your sonar.

Two weeks in the Molucca Sea produced two airplane sightings and not a single sonar contact. Finally, I got the OK to patrol elsewhere, but with an expected pending base change to Fremantle, could not afford to wander very far.

The small passage between Buru and Ceram at 127.20E, 03.20S looked inviting, but three full days produced nothing. Finally, at sunset of the third day, I proceeded due south into the Banda Sea. 50 nm south of the pass, with a strong 18 m/sec wind coming from over my right shoulder at 340 degrees, I got a sonar hit. Target was SE, range unknown. (I pinged but those long-range pings are terribly inaccurate; orders of magnitude inaccurate).

I surfaced and hit the throttle, diving again in about 10 minutes. The target was still south but had moved substantially to the west. I interpreted this to mean that the target was moving on some course substantially due west, at something like 10 knots, and plotted an intercepting course.

Surfacing again, I proceeded for about 30 minutes before diving to check sonar. But .... I overshot the target! Somehow in the dark night and the monstrous seas, the target had moved to my north. It was close enough to capture visually, and was moving north at about 12 knots into the very passage I had abandoned mere hours ago.

I turned the boat to follow, now into the teeth of the storm --- but could make no more than 10 knots. The merchant sailed away..... It struck me that, had this been real life, I would have been the laughing stock of the submarine command. My feeble example would have been grist for the mill at the Naval Academy.

I take two lessons: (1) at first contact, take a deep breath. Stay submerged until fixing, with some confidence, a reasonably accurate speed & course for the target; (2) if your ride is a dinosaur, beware the wind gage.