The Norfolk HUMEVAC

Lt. Long was the Navigator on the PCU Springfield (the designation before the ship is commissioned). One of his requests, before we ever got underway for the first time, was that we make up a primary chart for each of the ports we would expect to enter. This doesn’t seem unreasonable on the face of it, but in fact any chart made up months in advance would have to be done over, because of chart corrections, new editions, and so on. In addition, for piloting (surface navigation within sight of land) four copies of each chart were prepared: and since each port would have up to eight charts associated with it, this became a daunting prospect.

In the event, it wasn’t so bad: what he wanted was to have the track laid out, the navaids identified, all the notations and symbols we added to the chart to help us; that way, when we did visit the port we would have a plan already set and would just have to copy that onto the updated, corrected charts. That was sensible, and, as it turned out, a remarkable case of foresight.

Coming up the East Coast on some mission or other, we got notification of a HUMEVAC, a humanitarian evacuation; this is when some crewmember has a family crisis (death, injury, etc.) and is taken off the ship to be flown home. The nearest port was Norfolk; thanks to the Nav, we had the primary charts to copy. This didn’t make it too easy: Norfolk is one of those eight-chart ports, and four copies of each had to be corrected up-to-date and prepared: and only about 48 hours to do it in. QMC McLean, the Assistant Navigator, let me handle it. I took myself off the watch bill and commandeered a corner table on the mess decks; with the help of the off-watch QMs I corrected and prepared all the charts. I made sure the others in the division got their rest: we would all be up for the piloting party.

Curiously enough, I was the only member of the Navigation team that had ever been to Norfolk; I was there on the USS Kamehameha (SSBN 642), my first boat, when we pulled in for degaussing (removing the magnetism from the hull). Unfortunately, I was a seaman at the time, and kept the deck logs; I wasn’t actively participating in the piloting itself, but I had helped with the charts. Even so, navaid identification was an issue: at a distance, one water tank looks pretty much like any other, and church steeples are easy to confuse. The Nav and I planned to use GPS to compensate. GPS, the Global Positioning System, was still pretty new at the time, and (as it says on every chart) “The prudent navigator will not rely solely on any single aid to navigation…”. I set up our GPS waypoints and we used GPS fixes to validate our visual fixes: shoot the visual round, and identify new navaids by back-plotting their bearings from the GPS fix; by combining the two in this manner we were able to bridge the gaps where navaids were sparse. Crews experienced with Norfolk, naturally, knew their navaids by sight and didn’t have this problem.

As a last bit of planning, I got permission for one of the QMs to sleep through the piloting party and maneuvering watch, usually an all-hands evolution. I thoroughly briefed him on what we would be doing when we left Norfolk (I had to make up those charts, too) and sent him to bed. We piloted in all the way to the main Navy base, transferred the Sailor off to a tug, turned around, and headed back out. It was a long haul. Thanks to my foresight, when we secured the piloting party at last, there was the relief QM, up to speed on the plan, rested, and ready to take over. A job well done, that gives me a certain measure of satisfaction when I look back on it.