That's got to hurt. But it was inevitable: collision or grounding your ship is a one way ticket to loss of command and end of your career.
Lot of that going around lately.
That is a BIT#H of a transit! The current is strong and the lanes are quite narrow. Having taken a CVN through there twice, it is worse than the transit into Pearl!
Sub skippers and XO's are dropping like flies here of late.
As was expected, no surprises.
So here's what a submarine has to deal with for this transit. The strait is about 40 miles wide and maybe 100-120 feet deep, not a whole lot of maneuvering room for three dimensional travel. In that 100 or so feet of water, you have a tanker with a draft (distance from waterline to keel) of anywhere from 40 feet to who knows how much depending on how much he's carrying, sinve he was going in, I'd assume he was near empty. Next, you have the sub ranging about 30 feet from deck to keel + about that much more to the top of sail and there is no way to avoid overlap.
Couple that with the fact that your driving through a canyon so the acoustics are all hosed up and sounds are bouncing off everywhere and throw in numerous vessels since its the most heavily traveled chokepoint in the world, etc. You get the idea. Just because its done successfully so many times before doesn't make it easy or routine.
An unwritten but accepted practice when going through chokepoints like this is to find the biggest ship in the area and stay close to him figuring that everything else will be giving him plenty of room. I suppose thats what this CO had in mind.
Is this the one where the sub got sucked up by the frieghters displacement? Or a different incident?
Unfortunately, this is SOP. I have no doubt that the former Skipper is an outstanding man, but he knew the job was dangerous when he took it....