High Seas Encounter
Robert Mariner, East Sierra Branch
As my pen name implies, I’ve spent quite a bit of time on the ocean. Several years ago, I owned a 35-foot sailboat, and one summer I made a solo passage from the San Francisco Bay to Hawai’i and back. Nice cruise, and one particular event still stands out in my memory.
Ten days out from San Francisco, the wind dropped to nothing, the sea slowly quieted until it was absolutely flat, and for nearly a week the conditions were what sailors call a “dead flat calm.”
A couple of hours before local noon on the third day of this calm, I was half-dozing in the main cabin to stay out of direct sunlight, only to be yanked awake by the very faint sound of operating machinery. I bolted up out of the cabin, because one seldom hears ships approaching, and quickly scanned the entire horizon. Nothing was visible, and after the adrenaline subsided I could hear that sound again, still very faint, but louder than before. It was coming in through the hull, which meant it was from some source in the water.
The ocean doesn’t generate machinery sounds by itself, and because there was nothing visible in any direction, whatever was making that sound had to be submerged. I was well out in international waters, so that sound could only be from a submarine. (Awfully noisy for a submarine, I thought.) It must have been fairly close, and close to the surface, so I turned on my boat’s depth sounder / fish finder, hoping its signal would be picked up by whatever sub that might be, and help prevent a possible collision.
Military submarines all carry very sensitive sonar systems, and I was hoping the approaching sub had its sonar turned on and monitored by an alert crewmember
That hope seemed to be answered, because the machinery sounds abruptly became much quieter, also changing in ways I can’t really describe – they were just different. And then I heard faint splashing sounds off to my right and astern of my boat. I looked in that direction, and saw what appeared to be about three feet of pipe protruding from the water about 50 yards from my boat. It had to be a periscope; it was painted a dull, mottled dark gray to black, and was moving in a generally southerly direction. So I waved at it, and turned off my depth sounder to keep from inconveniencing that boat’s sonar operators. After a few moments, the periscope slid downward, disappearing beneath the surface. I assumed that because my boat was making no sound at all on that calm water, the sub’s crew had no idea I was there; submarines don’t generally do an active sonar search when approaching the surface in the middle of the ocean during a dead flat calm.
I never made any effort to find out to which navy that submarine belonged. But I did log the date, time and location of this little encounter.
Robert Mariner frequently contributes to
showcase’s fiction pages.