Around the World Submerged: The Voyage of the Triton

In the meantime, I had become acutely aware of the great versatility of Triton’s dual-reactor power plant. With the port engine stopped and locked fast, we were dragging our immobile port propeller through the water like a great bronze parachute. But the starboard engine, unaffected by anything that happened to its mate, was driving away with great ease. Although the leaking pipe caused our port engine to be stopped for over five hours, when the job was done, we had virtually maintained our required speed of advance—losing only a few miles which would be easy to regain.

One of the safety features designed into nuclear ships is a warning siren which sounds piercingly in the engineering spaces when certain important electrical circuits connected with the reactors malfunction. Hardly had the leak been fixed—I seemed to have been asleep less than a minute, though it actually was a couple of hours—when I heard the siren shrieking. Within seconds the engineering messenger had sought me out—as though I needed a special call after that alarm! It could signify only one thing; something was wrong with one of the reactors.

“What could be the matter?” I worried. The tremendous effort in design and training which had gone into our nuclear ships had produced a record of dependability unparalleled in the history of any Navy. It was unthinkable that the very heart of one of our power plants—the reactor—should have suffered a casualty, and at the very outset of our cruise. Yet this was the significance of the alarm.

Our casualty control organization was already in action when I arrived. The procedures laid down in the instruction book were meticulously followed. The entire circuitry of the plant was rigorously checked, and we soon found the source of our trouble: a bad electrical connection in the warning circuit itself. Our precautionary moves had been well taken, but the record of reliability of our machinery plant was so far unblemished.

As we sat down for breakfast, neither Don Fears, nor I, nor any of his engineers wished to go through many nights like the previous one. And yet, with some eighty-one more days to go on our cruise, it was inevitable that this one would not be the last.

According to Triton’s Log, shortly after completion of the general drills on that same day a message from New London informed us that Richard W. Steeley, Engineman Third Class, had become the father of a baby girl. The message, in duplicate, was brought directly to me from the radio room, but instead of sending immediately for Steeley, I sent instead for Jim Smith, Seaman First Class. Almost every ship has a cartoonist or artist of some kind. Smith was ours. By the time Steeley arrived to get the good news, Smith was gone. One dispatch form, labeled “Mother’s Copy,” was duly decorated with cupids and hearts and flowers. The carbon copy, marked “Father’s,” had two ugly pot-bellied old men.

Steeley had evidently been on watch in the engineering spaces when the summons for him arrived, but the self-conscious grin of happy relief on his face more than made up for the smudges and perspiration which were also there. Mother and daughter, the message stated, were fine—baby’s name: Bonnie Lynne.

One of the advantages of our new Kollmorgen celestial navigation periscope was the elimination of the need for a horizon. The periscope computes its own horizon; thus observations of sun, stars, or the moon can be made at any time the celestial bodies can be seen. Just after midnight, on the morning of the nineteenth of February, we had Triton back at periscope depth for a fix and ventilation. This fix, when computed, showed us to be short of our PIM (position of intended movement). In preparation for the voyage, a detailed track chart with our exact routing and the times we were supposed to pass through each point had been left with ComSubLant, so he would always know our exact position. Loss of time getting the feel of our ship, learning the techniques of getting some of the observations expected of us, and the somewhat reduced speed necessary for recent repairs had caused us to fall behind schedule. But for Triton, this was no serious problem. With a slight increase in power, our submarine cruiser began to tear through the water at a speed few ships could match, even on the surface. And but for the roar of steam passing through her turbines, there was no sensation of speed at all.