Back in action: Enormous U.S. aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower makes high-speed turns at sea...

Well...we don't know that, but we do know how far inland a battleship will go if it runs aground on a shoal at 15 knots!

My favorite grounding story, though, is that of the USS Missouri in 1950, because it has everything negative associated with it that is possible except loss of life. A new captain on his first time taking her to sea, stupidty, arrogance, ignorance, bad judgement, politics, money, engineering, embarrassment, a large ship and a monumental grounding.

Heh, on his first time out of Norfolk, VA, the captain decided to take her up to 15 knots in an area he shouldn't have anyway, went to the wrong side of a marker, had multiple people try to tell him he was going to the wrong side of a channel marker and sailed his 57,000 ton ship at 15 knots (at an unusually extreme high tide, for extra bad luck) onto a very, very gently sloping shoal of gooey, slippery solid mud.

There were people looking at each other (who knew the area well) wondering what he was doing, voiced their opinions and when a quartermaster spoke out, received an icy rebuke, the die was cast.

The ship sailed nearly half a mile onto the gooey, slippery mud, and the grounding was so gradual that the first indication they had on the bridge there was a problem was not the decrease of speed, but the overheating of machinery because the intake valves were sucking up mud!

She sat in full view of a major highway for two weeks, and they finally got her off after completely unloading EVERYTHING on the ship that could be moved, waiting for as high a tide as they could. They had 14 tugboats, and divers in the water with water hoses on the bottom using the jets to free mud from the ship's hull while tugs on each side worked in concert to rock the vessel, and tugs pulled astern.

Just amazing.

LOL...planes will NOT slide into the water, and if they do...the plane captains might just as well jump in and go over with them!

Those planes are probably a minimum of 12 point tie down with chains when they do that, I would guess, and maybe even more.

And there is a line chief growling at young plane captains that those chains damn well better have no slack in them...and if he found a saggy chain, there might be a swift kick in the ass!

Oh, wait. That was in a different Navy...

As for the water skiing, we all commented constantly on how much fun that would be, all the while knowing it was completely possible. Those things can move.

When I was on the Kennedy crossing the Atlantic on one of my cruises, they did a high speed run for about six hours. It didn’t start until after I had hit the rack and fallen asleep, and I woke up in a red-lit compartment that was right under the arrestor cables in the aft portion of the ship right under the flight deck to an intense thumping that was so loud I was alarmed. I would describe it later like this:

Imagine laying supine on a metal desk, and someone underneath the desk is kicking the bottom of it at a rate of about 240 times a minute. (If you pound your fist on a desk hard about 24 times in six seconds, it is a good approximation of what it sounded like!)

I put my clothes on and went down to the fantail, and the mountain of water the ship kicked up was amazing!

You guys are crazy.

When I was in the North Atlantic in 1976, we hit some extremely rough weather (the entire surface was frothy white) and we had a Knox class frigate off our starboard beam that was pretty close, and watching it from the catwalk (where we weren’t supposed to be...only a few people were on the flight deck from each squadron checking tie-down integrity!) that thing was pitching, rolling, and yawing, the bow would bury in the water and run along each side of the ship while the single prop was out of the water, then the bow would come completely out of the water, all the while, rolling and yawing.

It was amazing. Bird farms don’t move a lot, but that thing...I wondered how people lived on there.

My hat is always off to those Tin Can Sailors! (and to you!)

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.