October, 2022
Submarines!
Illahee State Park is on the outer edge of the city/town of Bremerton, WA. Bremerton is very well known in Washington State for its decades old, huge naval facility … active repair docks for the largest of current navy ships, facilities where they build navy ships, the location of an excellent navy museum, the Bremerton public marina that has historic navy ships you can board, and a nearby active nuclear submarine base, etc.
The US Navy is a big deal here. In fact, one year for the 4th of July celebration and fireworks, I spent the evening at some friends’ waterfront home just across the bay from Bremerton. WOW, FIREWORKS! The US Navy does like to blow things up!
So my camping friends on this camping trip and I decided to head to two different museums … the Naval Undersea Museum (submarines!) … and then later in the week to the Puget Sound Navy Museum (mostly about WWII and those ships and planes, but also older and newer history of the US Navy).
I’ve been to the Bremerton public marina by boat many times, and had visited the Bremerton Puget Sound Navy Museum twice before (it’s only a block or so away from the public marina in downtown Bremerton), so on this trip, I was especially eager to head just a little bit north of town (by vehicle on a road) to the Naval Undersea Museum since I’d never been there.
Want to go? Let’s go! Lots of photos coming here. Grab a drink and a snack and settle in. 🙂
I don’t like the war and violence part of this museum, so I don’t show much of that. But I’m fascinated by how things work, how a submarine works, and how humans live in those environments. So the latter curiosity is what I take with me as I visit places like this. US Navy submarines were used for ocean exploration and research, and for rescue, and for weather reporting, etc. This Naval Undersea Museum was fascinating!
The conning tower, or “sail”, of Sturgeon (USS-637), was the first Sturgeon-class nuclear-powered attack submarine to be built. Its conning tower has been on display here since 1995 . At 292 feet in length, with 109 people on board, this class of submarine was in service from the 1960s to 2004.
The conning tower is 30 feet long, 18 feet tall (not counting the antennae), and weighs 55 tons.
The side-mounted blades (properly called “fairwater planes”) help with stabilization, and can rotate to help with steerage, and they can be rotated to full vertical in order to help break ice above the submarine when surfacing under/through ice.
That was impressive!
We had barely gotten ourselves parked and out of our vehicle when we noticed these two subs (below) on the farther side of the parking lot.
Let’s start with the white one … Trieste II, a DSV 1 (deep submergence vehicle).
Lest you think that this one is small, the photo below may convince you otherwise.
I’ll share photos of the informational signs that were posted beside this submarine.
For more information about Trieste II, visit the Naval Undersea Museum’s webpage HERE.
And now let’s go explore the other submarine in the parking lot … Mystic, a DSRV 1 (deep submergence rescue vehicle).
The mechanism that steers this sub was fascinating. There is no rudder. At the aft end of the sub is the large white contraption that has vanes inside it. Those narrow vanes turn and steer the sub. The horizontal vanes turn to direct the sub up or down. And the lateral vanes turn to direct the sub to port or starboard. The propeller, of course, makes the sub move forward or backward.
Here (below) are the informational signs for Mystic.
Interestingly, this type of sub (there were only two of them) were built to rescue the crew from a sub that could no longer come to the surface. A number of subs had sunk and all hands lost prior to these two rescue subs being built. But, as soon as these two rescue subs were built, no more subs went down without being able to come up on their own power … so these two subs were never used to rescue anyone. Today, there is newer technology used for submarine rescue.
For more information about Mystic, visit the Naval Undersea Museum’s webpage HERE.
Here we are half way into this blog post, and we haven’t even gone through the front door of the museum!
Let’s walk back across the parking lot and get in the front door. Here are some of the things that interested me inside the museum.
The double dolphin pin is awarded to every US Navy submariner.
Passing down a special set of dolphins is not uncommon. Retired Officer Beth Coye pinned Laura Martindale with the dolphins that had been Officer Beth Coye’s late father’s dolphins.
Henry Kanahele, retired, pins dolphins on his newly qualified son, Nanikamaikaiamekaoluoluokanoho-Lokahipuanaonahoahanau Kanahele.
Here’s just a little info and a few photos about mines and torpedoes.
The interior of this museum was larger than it looked, from the outside, to me anyway. So much to see and do and read and learn.
An entire room was dedicated to oceans … how they are/were formed, temperature of the water, the movement of the water, the changing bottom of the ocean floor, how submarines navigate all of that, and what submarines (and submariners) have done to increase our knowledge about all of that.
Towards the end of the route we had taken through the building was this display …
Dolphins have been using biological sonar (echolocation) for millions of years. It’s more accurate and faster than anything humans have developed.
We humans think we’re so smart. Here (below) is what we need to go even a few hundred feet below the surface of the ocean.
That was a super museum! I’m sure I didn’t take in even half of what I saw, and I sure didn’t see everything.
In the end, my questions were … 1) how does one pronounce the word mariner … a sailor who sails the seas? MARE-ih-ner, yes? And then 2) how does one pronounce the word submarine? Sub-mah-REEN, yes? Ok, here’s the tricky part … 3) how does one pronounce the word submariner … one who sails the seas in a submarine? Well, there are differences of opinion! But I asked that question while my friends and I were here at this museum this day, and I was told “officially” that the pronunciation “sub-ma-REEN-er” is wrong. The word “submariner” is correctly based on a mariner who sails on a “sub” … hence, the correct pronunciation of sub-mariner is “sub-MARE-ih-ner”. Just take the word “mariner” and add “sub” in front of it.
The British pronounce it correctly. It’s some USA people (including some US Navy folk) who incorrectly pronounce it “sub-ma-REEN-er”. But the US Navy says it’s “sub-MARE-ih-ner”. You take a mariner and then put them under water, and they become a sub-mariner. A submarine is a thing … a sub-mariner is a person … different pronunciation.
Remember to keep the lens on your periscope clean. 🙂