USS Hartford Heading Home

USS Hartford (SSN 768) is doing a surface transit home following her collision with USS New Orleans (LPD 18) last month. Here's a Navy Times story about the new post-collision updates, and here's an official Navy story that says the Hartford's COB was relieved prior to the boat getting underway by a temporary relief -- you can read into that what you want. You can also look at this picture of the submarine underway to see the reinforcement they made to the sail -- it's best seen by downloading the hi-res version. (I'll post a close-up of the sail later; I'd do it this morning, but I have an early meeting at work.)

What stories do you have about ridiculously long surface transits?

Update 0643 30 Apr 2009: Sorry for not posting the picture; our main computer that has my photo editing software died, so I'm stuck trying to figure out how to use the laptop with all the kids programs on it. You'll have to just click on the hi-res version linked above and see for yourself.

Off topic, if you just ignore the troll, it makes it easier for me to delete his posts when I get home from work. I hesitate to do so when it would make normal commenter's comments look dumb when they aren't relating to comments that exist anymore. Also, for those who were wondering, since I'm on Blogger, I can't ban any particular people or IP addresses.

Update 1152 30 Apr: A reader sent in a close-up photo of the sail: