Despicable Me


I have a few self-aggrandizing tales; nothing too dramatic. I was a good Quartermaster, and by the time I served on the USS Springfield (SSN 761) as a First Class Petty Officer (E-6), I was very experienced. For various reasons, I was standing Quartermaster of the Watch underway.

The Navigator while I was aboard (we transferred at about the same time) was LT (later LCDR) Jeffrey C. Long. He was a nice enough fellow, but very picky, very insistent on doing things correctly and on time. Frankly I needed someone to push me on occasion. I was the division Leading Petty Officer, with a Chief Petty Officer over me as Assistant Navigator (QMC/SS McLean). I was responsible for preparing the charts we used; they would be reviewed by Chief McLean, and then by the Navigator, before being submitted to the Commanding Officer (CDR R.K. Ford) for final approval.

The Nav frequently returned charts for corrections of what would seem the most niggling details; a favorite of his was the application of chart tape. A submarine in transit is given a particular path through the ocean to follow, a certain distance allowed to either side. This was coordinated by the area commanders to prevent two submarines from occupying the same area at the same time (this is technically known as a collision). I did this coordination for Submarine Group Two in New London as my last tour before I left the service. A quartermaster would plot this track on the open ocean charts, and the distance to either side laid out, so as to form a lane within which the sub was allowed to travel. To make the boundaries of the lane stand out, chart tape was applied; it is a thin tape with many different colors, patterns, and widths. It naturally enough stuck up above the smooth surface of the chart, so that it was possible to spread a pair of dividers and run them down the lane, touching the tape to either side and ensuring the width was correct.

The natural inclination of the person preparing the chart would be to lay the tape directly on the penciled line marking the boundary. This, however, meant that a part of the tape was inside the boundary, stealing precious available space. Depending on the scale of the chart, as much as a half-mile could be wasted, vanished beneath the tape. Lt. Long would set his dividers to the proper width, and run them down the track. Didn’t touch the tape on either side? Ran over the tape, instead of down the inner edge? Time to re-tape. After several repetitions, I learned to apply the tape properly. The difficulty was compounded by the fact that the open-ocean charts would cover several degrees of latitude using a Mercator projection; this meant that the length of a mile on the chart was noticeably different between the top and bottom of the chart (trust me on this). Therefore, on a north-south run, measurements had to be taken at several points to ensure the width of the lane was correctly plotted.

I began to take pleasure in outwitting the painstaking Nav. Yes, he was responsible for making me even more anal-retentive. The transit orders we got, detailing each point we had to pass through on the approved path, and the time we were to reach it, had to be plotted, along with ticks every so often representing where we had to be along the path. In other words, we were to leave point A at, say, 1200, and arrive at point B 9 hours and 43 minutes later, and then continue on to point C. On the line I’d draw between points A and B, with their chart-taped lane to either side, I would put ticks representing where we had to be at 1300, 1400, and so on. Because of the chart distortion, again, the length of these intervals varied as you moved north or south. It was a point of pride to have the last tick before point B at the exact distance required, 43 minutes of travel at the designated speed. I considered it cheating to plot back from the end point and meet in the middle, fudging the difference. Well do I remember when a new QMC arrived to take QMC McLean’s place, and he laid out a chart for himself and had me check it. I was saying, no, no, won’t work: look, the tape is on the line, and your last tick is just over a mile off. He waved me off, couldn’t believe it mattered, and indeed it was trivial. But he came back from the Nav with a new appreciation of what I was trying to tell him.

Another factor was chart overlap, or the lack thereof. The charts we used shared common borders along even degrees: you could tape all the charts together into one super-chart with no overlap. Because the points detailed in the transit order were well inside the boundaries of the charts instead of on the edges, that is exactly what I did: fold the chart borders so that the boundary was right on the edge, tape them together lined up exactly, and use a long straightedge to lay down the track between the points. There was a computer program we could run that would take the points we input, and provide a solution showing us the proper course of the track; and we could use that to determine the point at which the track would cross the borders of the charts. Some, including the QM1 that relieved me, used that program to lay the charts out. Once a simple mistake he made in entering the data threw him way off, and it took me hours to fix: I had to do it from scratch. I used the program, too, but I just used it to double-check what I had already plotted by hand.

Shortly after I went to shore duty, Sublant, who made up the open-ocean transit orders (in the Atlantic, of course), changed the computer program they used to generate them, and the new version politely put the intermediate points right on the even degrees that marked the boundaries of the charts, thus rendering the plotting ever so much easier, accurate, and less prone to error. One of the more common errors among QMs was to shift from one chart to another and be off by a degree or more. The OOD was supposed to double-check those positions, but the human factor was always there. I remember as a youngster coming on watch and discovering we had been a degree off for the two previous watches – the one had shifted charts, and his relief wasn’t paying attention to the degree labels when he assumed the watch; he just plotted his positions where the last guy was. This was on an SSBN, on patrol in a huge area in the middle of nowhere; no danger in that circumstance but still an egregious error.