20020512

May 12, 2002

Start: Witch Meadow Lake Campground, Salem CT
End: 
Miles: 0

Well, the rain came; a light sprinkle in the morning and then it quit. 

We made up pancakes and ate. I hiked down to the “camp store” and bought the Sunday paper for the funnies. We read them and sipped coffee until it was time for church. It looked like everyone in the campground was packing up to go home.

We went to Our Lady of the Lakes, where we attended for six years, ending 24 years ago when we moved to Manassas. They’ve added a little section to the church, but not much has changed. I guess you could say that for the whole area – there have been a few improvements, but not much has changed. 

The county’s (and the state’s) largest employer was the submarine shipyard here in Groton, across the river Thames from New London, with about 17,000 people at their high-water mark. Now they’re down around 4,000 since very few submarines are being built. 

The local Indian tribe won the right to have their own land about 20 years ago and put a casino on the land. They’ve since added hotels, restaurants, and a convention center. Now they are the largest employer in the county. 

The casino, though, doesn’t pay as much as the shipbuilders paid. So the overall economy is down by quite a bit in this region, starkly contrasting with the wild construction and home sales around Washington, DC.

After church we took a ride to remind Dolores of the route she used to take the kids to the pre-school center in Niantic. Then we rode along the shore eastward to Ocean Beach and then Pequot Avenue near the old New London light. The view of New London Ledge Light, out next to the channel, is still nice. Then we turned inland toward downtown New London. 

We found the big new R&D center just built by Phizer that, when fully staffed, ought to help the economy. Phizer’s headquarters is across the river on the Groton side. They’re actually going to ferry employees back and forth across the river to attend meetings, or for the convenience of the workers who might live on the other side. Rather unique.

Just north of that is the area that contained the Naval Underwater Systems Center, where I was stationed the last three years of my Navy career and where I retired from the Navy in 1978. It’s gone. All the buildings except the very last one built (which is well off to one corner of the total site) and the three little brick Coast Guard buildings are gone. 

Fort Trumbull is now the attraction on this site; it was on the south edge of the NUSC land and was used by NUSC mainly for storage. This particular fort was built around the time of the civil war. It’s walls are stone and are many feet thick, which were sufficient then. There was a smaller fort in that place in Revolutionary times, to compliment Fort Griswold on the Groton side. Fort Griswold was beaten and occupied by forces under Benedict Arnold in English uniform.

One set of the fort’s officer’s quarters is being restored, the other set having been converted to the visitor’s center. The whole smash is supposed to open for visitors by Memorial Day.

There is an EPA cleanup in progress at the old NUSC site to clean up some chemical contaminants. I’m told there are four different agencies fighting with each other in the courts for the rights to the land.

After shedding a figurative tear for old NUSC, we proceeded downtown, along Bank Street, past the 1880’s train station and then over the bridge to Groton. On the waterfront on that side, we found the Seahorse restaurant and had lunch. We had a great view of the cloudy day over New London. The Coast Guard training ship (a full-rigged tall ship named USCGC Eagle) was at the city pier and looked good, as always.

I told Dolores that I’d been up and down the river we were looking over many times. I told her of the operational cycle of USS Sarda, my first submarine, here in New London. It was an old world-war-II designed boat, built at the very end of the war. It had never been upgraded, due to its unique conning tower (longer than normal, an experiment that didn’t prove much). Sarda was scrapped a few years after I left.

Sarda was a training boat. Most weeks were devoted to enlisted submarine school operations. Each day, we would go down the river early in the morning with enlisted submarine school students aboard. Then we’d do a turn to the west into Long Island Sound. The students would rotate from station to station and do the actions required at each station as the ship made sixteen dives and surfacings. Thus, they’d get a good idea of the complexity of a submarine and a good view into what has to happen correctly. We’d come back upriver and tie up late in the afternoon.

Other weeks we would go out into the Atlantic for the full week with officer trainees. They were put through more arduous training. This included scenarios where something would be configured wrong that would affect diving or steering or some other critical function. Then the students would be put under pressure to diagnose and correct the “problem”.

One of these evolutions I still remember. We had had spaghetti for the evening meal. It wasn’t very good, for some reason, so most of the crew just scraped it off their plates into the large garbage can we used. It was heaping full. The chief instructor had the indicator light for the bow buoyancy ballast tank vent valve removed, so the student wouldn’t see that it was still shut. The chief of the watch was told not to open it when he opened all the other ballast tanks at the sound of the diving alarm.

The diving alarm sounded, and the lookouts and student officer came piling down the hatch from the bridge to control the submarine as it submerged. The chief pulled all the vent valve handles for all tanks but bow buoyancy, and sea water flooded into the tanks. The boat went down, but slowly and without much of an angle. Every time the student tried to slow the boat, the bow would rise and he would have to increase the ship’s speed again to stay down. He pumped a lot of water from aft to forward trim, thinking he could get 
the bow down that way, but that didn’t work either.

Finally, he spotted a missing indication on the board, looked at the valve handles, found the bow buoyancy handle in the wrong position, and ordered “open bow buoyancy vent”. The chief did that, water rushed into the tank, and the bow got heavy – fast.

The boat started taking a down angle and it was increasing rapidly. It became apparent that something would have to be done soon, either by the student or by the crew without waiting for the student. The auxiliaryman who would be called upon to blow main ballast tanks to restore positive buoyancy started edging around the plot table toward the blow valves.

Then the heavy garbage can of spaghetti broke loose and slid forward. It stopped at the bulkhead door between the crew’s mess and the control room. But the spaghetti didn’t stop. A lot of it kept going over the lower edge of the door and into the control room, sliding down the passageway. The student officer ordered “blow bow buoyancy tank” and the auxiliaryman took off toward the blow manifold. He and the 
spaghetti met in mid-stride and down he went, sliding forward with the pasta. Somebody, probably the real diving officer, managed to hang onto things and blow the tank. A few minutes later we were on the surface again, laughing like mad. Then we went to work cleaning up the boat so we could continue training.

The lunch was very nice, and Dolores enjoyed the stories.

The rain started again as we left Groton, so we decided to take the rest of the day off. The rain let up as we arrived at the campground but we didn’t change our mind. The campground was deserted – very few cars and no people in sight. Looks like the forecast drove them home early.

A bit later, the furnace fan ran but it didn’t get any warmer in the trailer. Investigation showed that one propane tank had run out and the other was also empty, due to improper installation by this writer. When I checked it, I found I hadn’t threaded the hose all the way onto the fitting on the bottle, so the propane leaked out.

I rigged up the little electric heater, which was sufficient to keep the place warm. I wouldn’t want to use it exclusively, though.

Then I made another trip to the camp store, where I found that a person comes around to charge propane bottles every day at 8:30, 12:30, and 4:30. I paid and left mine. At 4:30, I went down to see if it had been charged. Nope. I waited and a few minutes later the operator came along. I brought the bottle back and installed it correctly. The heat came back on as it should. I’ll get the other one charged at a propane dealer in Vermont or New Hampshire in the next day or two, where it should be less expensive.

The rain started again and a thunderstorm came along to make things noisy for a while.

I got out the laptop to catch up the journal. 

We had a small dinner in the little house in the rocky campground, marinated chicken and salad. We’ll depart for Vermont/New Hampshire after breakfast tomorrow. The weather is strange – they’re forecasting snow for the upper parts of Vermont and New York tonight.

Disney has “Dinotopia” on tonight, so we’ll let our minds go for a while.