Handling a ship with 60,000 horsepower in heavy weather and staying on course required focus, and as I learned I began to enjoy it. There was a lot to learn and being the Helmsman underway was challenging. In the old days Boatswain Mates handled the sails and rigging. We were also responsible for underway refueling and replenishments. Underway we stood watch as lookouts and served on the bridge as Helmsmen. We were also responsible for loading equipment and stores aboard the ship. In port we maintained the exterior of the ship, mostly chipping paint, and repainting. Air Force program, but since I had no Navy training I started my new life on the deck force. Man, it does not get much worse than that! Getting my feet wetĪs a civilian, I had been working as an electronics technician for a small company that manufactured pressure transducers for the NASA space program and for a classified U.S. I was what was called an “immediate active duty” reservist. I showed up straight out of boot camp, and I was about to become the lowest-ranking sailor on the ship-a newly minted Seaman Apprentice. My involvement with the Steinaker began on a miserably cold and rainy October evening when I arrived at the destroyer and submarine piers at Naval Station Virginia, the largest navy base in the world. Normally, the sub would simply move far enough from our path to remain undetected, keeping it safe from attack, but also rendering it ineffective and irrelevant to us. In practice our emissions could be detected by an adversary long before any echoes would be strong enough to be detected back aboard our ship. That would suggest that it could transmit enough acoustic energy to bounce off a submarine 20 miles away and the echo from its hull would return enough energy to allow detection. The AN/SQS-23 sonar system had a maximum display setting of 40,000 yards, or 20 nautical miles. Our sonars were so powerful that at night they sometimes caused plankton to phosphoresce as a pulse swept over them, producing expanding green concentric circles of light radiating outward at the speed of sound from our enormous bow-mounted 30-foot sonar domes. The entire northeastern Atlantic was probably ringing with bottom bounce echoes and reverberations, and any hostile submarines, along with every whale, porpoise, and sea turtle within 20 miles was probably trying its best to get away from us as we approached. Each sonar was tuned to a slightly different frequency to reduce mutual interference. Our top speed was 36.8 knots-destroyers are known as “Greyhounds” for a reason.Ī few years prior to my arrival aboard Steinaker, the decades-old ship had undergone a major fleet rehabilitation and modernization program, or FRAM, where new weapon systems and a new AN/SQS-23 sonar system had been installed.Īs we headed east, our sonars were all in active mode, all with a peak output power of 50,000 watts.
Our main purpose was anti-submarine warfare, or ASW. It was 390 feet long and was powered by two steam turbines producing 60,000 shaft horsepower and driving two 14-foot propellers. My ship, the USS Steinaker (DD-863) was a Gearing class destroyer, and like the others, it had been built during the closing months of World War II. It was the height of the Cold War and tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States were extremely high. We were now headed off on a multi-month Mediterranean cruise. It was a Friday and we had departed the big naval base in Norfolk, Virginia nearly two weeks earlier to participate in a large naval exercise. Navy destroyers steamed east in a line abreast at 20 knots, heading for the Strait of Gibraltar. In the North Atlantic on the evening of January 20, 1967, four U.S.