In the mid-seventies, we were in one of Mare Island's drydocks with a bunch of holes, when we we told that we had to vacate the drydock immediately. The quickly put cofferdams around each hole in the pressure hull and stuck us back in the water. Shortly thereafter, one of the sneak-attack boats mentioned in "Blind Man's Bluff" took our place in drydock. They didn't even have all the lines across before they put a tarp over the entire sail. The whole area was crawling with heavily armed marines with no sense of humor. We were never told exactly why they were there, but the scuttlebutt was that they'd brought back some exotic new soviet paint for analysis.
The hard way, no doubt...
That wasn't us. We went to Adak to get our paint cleaned off, among other things.
That was one of the ones I supervised repairs, work package development, changes, "improvements", extensions, etc on.
Sorry.
A lot of times, we didn't get much notification: about what went right, what went wrong, what needed routine repairs, or what needed emergency repairs.
I tried to keep DryDock 4 "saved" for emergencies, but I couldn't always just hold it empty for several weeks just because we "might" not need it. Then when the Parche went it for her long conversion and extension, it screwed up the schedule for years -> which affected the in-and-out schedule for DryDock 3 too!
""Blind Man's Bluff" "
Great read.
I wonder if the story about the Russian Sub breaking apart during the salvage by the Glomar Explorer is true, or was a cover story because we retrieved the entire boat?