"Unofficial" Submarine Patches

As I was blogging about the new USS Georgia patch in the post below, I started thinking about the "unofficial" patches that different groups on the boat would come up with. They were always very inventive, if sometimes a little vulgar. On Connecticut, the midwatch nuke guys (we stuck the drill monitors on midwatch for an ORSE workup, so they got essentially no sleep) came up with their own patch that was quite humorous, despite the fact that it had a really bad word on it.

A reader let me know about an interesting patch from USS Thomas Jefferson (SSBN 618). The patch, from this web page. Here's how the patch originated:

The 618 Gold crew in the late 1960's was pretty tight and we had a great CO by the name of Purdum. Somehow we got know as a bunch of pirates -- I think the XO of the blue crew had something to do with it....

The patch itself is here:

In my post below, I was talking about how it was hard to read the "SSBN" part on the Georgia's original, pre-SSGN logo. For the "Purdum's Pirates" patch, apparently someone noticed that if you turned the patch upside down, the Olde English lettering in the "SSBN 618" spelled out something completely different:

Can you see it?

Speaking of submarine logos, the N77 website has a couple of pages of official ship's seals they put together a few years ago that included the logos of most of the boats in commission in about 1998; the one for Los Angeles-class boats is here, and the one for Ohio-class SSBNs is here.