Nords, last week DW and I dropped down to Ft. Myers Beach for a little R & R and heard about the hurricane about to hit you. I got to thinking, I thought all "hurricanes" in the Pacific were called typhoons. I know that's what they are called in Okinawa. Clue me in again.
There are at least two activities naming storms out here-- one group in the Eastern Pacific (I think Miami's National Hurricane Center?), another in the Central Pacific (Central Pacific Hurricane Center), and a third west of the dateline (don't remember who). The first two call them hurricanes, with appropriate Mainland or Hawaiian names indicating where the storm formed. West of the dateline they're typhoons with some sensitive international politically-correct naming convention. My spouse the military meteorologist used to be the ops officer at the Joint Typhoon Warning Center so she can go into much more excrutiating detail on where the lines are drawn. It makes for interesting conversations when the forecast says one thing for the visitors while the weather charts/satellite images are showing something not quite the same as what the media are spouting. The trash-talking among military METOCs makes submariners look like diplomats.
Would it be completely tacky to say "batten down the hatches" right now?
Hope all turns out well there. Stay safe!
We're making the rounds again today-- educating our tenants about the yard's high-water mark and encouraging them to clean up their stuff, checking a friend's house (they're on the Mainland, their driveway slopes downhill to their garage, not so good for rain runoff), and then clearing the last of our [-]junk[/-] valued collectibles off our lanai.
Felicia's falling into a tropical depression but it's full of water. We're probably going to get 4-6" starting Tuesday afternoon, and around here that's half a year's rainfall. We'll definitely leak-check our roof repairs. Tomorrow morning it's a round of backups, battery-charging, and filling water jugs.
Watched Crimson Tide last night. Don't know how true-to-life the story is, but have a new appreciation for Nords and his fellow submariners...
Rambler, if you want to have some fun ask Nords who played him in the movie...
The movies don't come close to capturing the feel of it. After a tour of the USS Torsk (WWII diesel sub) at the Baltimore Maritime Museum all of the guys I was with agreed that "Those guys had Big Brass Ones".
I cannot imagine working for months at a time under such cramped conditions while listening to depth charges. While I'm sure modern submarines have a little bit more room, there probably isn't much more.
That movie didn't exactly have the U.S. Navy's support. During filming the director's helicopter tried to buzz a background film shot of an OHIO class submarine that was visiting Pearl Harbor. Naval Region ended up calling in the Coast Guard and the FAA and causing the pilot far more grief than he got in money.
That film is legendary in the submarine force for taking the worst possible features of each officer and putting them in direct conflict with each other. In real military life there are far more subtle non-confrontational ways to [-]stab your CO in the back[/-] seek compromise and consensus. But I swear that I've had at least two CO's in Hackman's image, and I've known of at least three more. [-]For example there's the cigar-chomping CO in the documentary "Sharks of Steel".[/-] Names provided to fellow submariners upon PM request, but you already know who they are...
The crew's behavior isn't too far off, although I'd love to have their VLF communications technology.
The "Tide" movie also gets a huge mess-decks laugh when the TV news shows some national crisis flaring up and all the boomer boys' beepers start going off. In real life they'd be handing the boomer's ice cream machine over to a fast attack submarine that ran out of time to fix their own before they had to sortie. Sometimes it's hard to believe that boomer and fast-attack submariners are shipmates in the same Navy.
[-]I was the missile tube visited by Gene Hackman's dog.[/-] I was a nuclear engineering junior officer on my boomer and a Weapons Officer on my attack sub. (For some obscure liberty-related reason the crew found it appropriate to rename me after that old 1980s pop song "Wild Wild Weps".) Weps wasn't exactly a career-enhancing job but it was a lot more fun than being a navigator or an engineer. Most fun of all was running the submarine training center's fire-fighting and damage-control (flooding) trainers. It was there that we'd figure out who had problems with small, enclosed [-]fires and flooding[/-] spaces... or who was pushing cardiac problems.
It's probably a psychological thing, but I always felt that I had plenty of room. The WWII subs are a bit tight and modern subs are a bit better. I have plenty of scar tissue from banging into various hatch coamings and other projections but my phobias are air travel, naval aviators, and stormy seas. I don't like roller coasters either.
You want submarine movies I'd recommend "Das Boot" and "U-571". DB's storm scenes, popping rivets, and battery problems are unfortunately very accurate. The U-571 scene where they take over the German sub and figure out how to launch torpedoes in about 90 seconds is total fantasy but very realistic adrenaline.