Sea Stories...most of us have 'em.

[DPCSDan]

Great duty station?
Lousy duty station?
Great bar?
Lousy city?

DPs, even though we were the more refined sailor, still have memories of wild escapades before we settled down and got respectable.

What are some of yours? It can be some nice and clean memory like when you got your first crow...

Or something raunchy, like those trips to Tiajuana. You'd have to be an old timer, but you might even mention the Blue Fox? If you're planning on going into politics, don't name names.

Here's one of the stories I've carried around for thirty years. An old chief DP, a member of this board, is said to have dropped his wife off at the base hospital to have their second child, and he went bowling.

Fact or fiction? Any good sea story probably contains a sprinkling of both.

Let's hear those sea stories!

[jimbo1173]

My weirdest story was from the USS Canopus (AS-34). We were still in Rota in early 1979. Our printer belt broke, so every time a "line feed" was sent to the printer, it would just keep printing over the same spot on the paper. One of our DSs (may have been Robin Hunter) somehow jury-rigged an electric drill to the printer, and every time a line feed command would come in, the drill would advance the paper. Didn't work for long, though...

Mr. James Friedrichs
(DPCM(AW/SW), USN, DAV, Ret)
Contractor
NAVSISA Code 942 (SALTS)
700 Robbins Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19111
(215) 697-5934 DSN 442 Fax 1476

[DP1Steve]

This is more of an ID-10-T story than a sea story. Had a Stock Control Officer once who didn't know a damn thing about computers, especially the DPS-6. He wanted a phone call if ANYTHING went wrong. Tape error, bad data, anything. SOB chewed my ass one day because I didn't call him at 3am to tell him about a completely inconsequential tape error. That was the last time I tried to save somebody from being woke up in the middle of the night. After that, I took great pleasure in waking him up multiple times a night for the stupidest thing.

He was also the ID-10-T who told us not to use any tapes unless they had been cleaned in the last 4 hours... not days, not weeks... HOURS. I was so glad to get away from that moron.

[DBlouin]

When I was stationed in Naples, Italy at Naval Support Activity (1977-1980), we ran an IBM 360/30 with an old 1403 printer.
One day the print chain broke and of course the only spare we had contained the Italian character set. Anyone who has ever been in Italy knows that they don't use periods, just commas. Well, our senior chief's wife was the premier COBOL programmer.....see where this is leading all you old COBOL programmers. Yep...she received her first compile listing after the chain replacement and went completely bonkers. COBOL programmers must have the character that completes each command....a little old period.... Now this program was about 3,000 lines long at this point and, of course, there were errors in the compile. Needless to say, we were really glad when IBM europe sent us a good old American character set printer chain the following week. Got a hug from the senior chief's wife, too.

[rbernard]

The place: USS Hunley (AS-31), somewhere out in the Irish Sea.
The time: circa 1964
The foil: LCDR(SC) (name withheld to protect the innocent)

The word is passed, via the 1MC, that a sea bat has been captured. Anyone wishing to see this rare animal should lay up to the 02 level, port side, just aft of the bridge. A young MA3 eagerly goes up to see what a sea bat looks like. Once there, he approaches a 55 gallon drum with a red light in it, shrouded by a burlap covering. The drum is laid horizontally on the deck, and one has to bend over to see the animal caged in there. Before he gets to the object of his curiosity however, he is held back by one of his buddies, a BM striker with a few years of sea duty under his belt. "Watch this", his friend advises.

The LCDR(SC) is waiting to see this phenomenon and gets head-of-the-line priviliges.
He bends down to see the contents of the barrel.
He gets whacked in the ass with a straw broom.
He stands up, turns around, and says to the young seaman with the broom: "Knock that off, will you. I want to see this thing" and bends down again.
WHACK!!

He was a good man. It took him 2 tries, but he got the joke.
(Better him, than our young MA3).