Submarine anchors - used when and where?

[ET2SN]

Originally Posted by Platapus

1. They were really not used much in war patrols

They are not used much, if at all.

Back in the good old days, we were still being held prisoner in a PHNSY drydock (AKA "home" ) when the ship's anchor was busted out of storage and left in a pile back near the rudder.
Being we were stuck in shipyard duty, always a tedious and boring affair, many of us gathered to look at the anchor and comment on its presence, 'cuz, well, we were that bored.

"Check out the chain, something's wrong.." a TM bud says.
And, he was right. Three quarters of the chain links were wrong. Several years prior, something had gone wrong and most of the links had been replaced in a rather hasty manner. The new links were Canadian chain, top quality but also forged using the metric system.

The upshot was that the rest of us all said "Huh, how about that.." and went on to find other things to stare at while filing away the factiod for use during quals check-outs on un-suspecting nubs.

About a year later, we finally get the boat back in the water and the CO gets a burr in his saddle to do a Dependent's Cruise to Lanai as a reward to the families. Dependent's Cruises were becoming more popular in the Navy, but not on subs. Subs have many Things That Can Hurt You and mix of these items plus civilians and young-uns was not being looked forward to.

A little later, my TM bud and I are dutifully studying our Bluejackets manuals in the barracks when my QM roomie shows up. "You're not going to believe this, we'll have to anchor out when we get to Lania..".
"You're kidding, right? Didn't anyone think this thing through?"
"Well, obviously..."

At which point my TM bud remembers our quals ambush factiod and says, "Don't we have to drop the anchor if we anchor out? I wonder if it'll drop?" . "Well, maybe they fixed the chain before they winched it back into the boat?" (PHNSY has become legendary to us by this point when it came to dropping the ball).

Now, we did the right thing and passed this info up the chain of command.


We still set sail for Lanai, of course, with many wives, girlfriends, and kids wondering how to flush the toilets and "What does this thing do?".
We also dove and our intrepid skipper put on a display of the capabilities of a Los Angeles class sub, a display which was so good that all of our dependents needed to be debriefed after we got home. You know that stock Navy statement, "In excess of 20 knots and 200 feet"? Yeah, we kinda broke that..

So, we make it to our mooring area off Lanai. Now, good sailors will bet on almost anything and there was some considerable "action" on whether or not the anchor would do its thing.
The Nav takes a deep breath and gives the order to drop the anchor. Five seconds later Sonar comes on the MC to report hearing some kind of "thumpy-clangy sound" that came from back aft.

We winch the anchor back in and try it again...

To make a long story shorter, there are specific conditions that separate being under way from at anchor. We were definitely NOT at anchor, so..

The small boat showed up to take our civilian guests to their already-reserved hotels plus my TM bud who got hosed with a long weekend of Shore Patrol, which was slightly ironic in that he was the only active duty person on the island. At least he didn't have to arrest himself.

For the rest of us, we spent a couple of days making interesting geometric patterns on our charts and wondering if Lanai was really the garden paradise it was said to be.