"What Happens On EastPac Is Supposed To Stay On EastPac!"

Based on this story in Navy Times, I imagine that's what a Taiwanese Vice Admiral (and former commander of their Sub Force) is saying today after one of his liberty excursions made the paper back home:

Vice Admiral Shen Po-chih, deputy commander of the navy, denied yesterday he did anything wrong while he was on a visit to Hawaii in 2002.
In a statement, the Navy Command said Admiral Shen, charged with visiting a strip-tease show instead of the USS Santa Fe, does not mind being investigated.
The Liberty Times published an expose yesterday, quoting a retired navy commander as testifying Shen, the then deputy fleet commander, refused to visit the U.S. nuclear submarine in Hawaii in order just to watch the strip-tease show.
The retiree was with Admiral Shen on Hawaii from December 17 through 22...
...According to the Liberty Times, six naval officers, including Shen, were invited to visit the U.S. Pacific Fleet after President George W. Bush approved in 2001 a major arms sale to Taiwan in 2001.
Lee said the navy has taken a serious note toward the case. But he added it is necessary to find out whether the strip-tease show was "an ordinary floor show, which is quite normal in the West or anything erotic."

Midwatch Cowboy has more. I can just imagine the staff guy who was in charge of making sure the visiting dignitaries kept to their schedule calling the CO of the Santa Fe: "Uh, Captain, the Taiwanese aren't going to be coming down to the boat today -- they got sidetracked."

While I don't know if this really happened or not, and I surely don't want to condone Taiwanese Admirals wasting their TAD money on morally questionable activities when they're on the government dime -- don't you secretly feel kinda proud that there's a submariner out there who still knows how to put the "oo" in "Boondoggle"?

Oldschool Animation

Amusing text-based animation.

Battle Of Midway Anniversary

This week marks the 55th65th anniversary of the Battle of Midway, which turned the tide in the Pacific War. Steeljaw Scribe has been posting an excellent series on the battle; just start at the top of the page, and scroll down.

"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.

New "Hey, Shipwreck" Video

The 12th episode of "Hey, Shipwreck" just got posted:

A wife calls the boat to get in touch with her husband in the duty section. Everyone remembers getting calls like that. (On my last two boats, the new phone systems were able to forward outside calls to any phone on the boat -- including the one in Maneuvering. I spent more time explaining to helpful coners that, no, he shouldn't be forwarding calls from the SRO's wife back to him when he was on watch in the box.)

Update 2311 01 June: This is probably the USS Georgia (SSGN 729) ship's seal mentioned in the video:

Update 0658 02 June: I was informed in my E-mail inbox that, despite the fact that the letter between the "SS" and "N" on the left side of the logo above looks like a scrunched-together "13", it's really supposed to be a "B", meaning the one above is the Georgia's old SSBN seal. The new SSGN seal is (supposedly) below -- if one trusts people who E-mail them stuff. This one comes from a pretty reliable source, though:

Purty fancy!