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Ocean Weather Station Hotel: A Stormy Address 100 By Lieutenant Michael R. Adams, U. S. Coast Guard Submersibles With Panoramic Visibility 102 By Howard R. Talkington, Naval Undersea Center
"Am experiencing some difficulties of my own. Hangings for rubber boats let go, taking four with them. Belly gripe on one boat was reinforced with considerable line, and the line and belly gripe parted. Had fire in IC room and temporarily lost the gyro. Fire out quickly. Number three engine OOC [out of commission]. Weather: seas 030 at 40-50 feet, winds 040/55 knots, visibility zero.”
No seaman needs any amplification of that message to appreciate the precarious position of the ship sending it. Yet the vessel which originated the message in March 1973 was not in a storm by accident or through the negligence of her captain or crew. Rather, it was originated by the Coast Guard meteorological cutter Gresham (WAGW-387) as she attempted to reach the scene of a sinking merchant vessel. At the time, the Gresham was carrying out her duties as ocean weather station Hotel (OWSH).
Ocean stations were established by international agreement for the purpose of providing overseas aircraft with communications and navigation assistance when out of range of shore-based facilities. Additionally, the vessels on station are available in case of aircraft emergencies. Since the station ships already gathered weather information for transient aircraft, little further effort was required to use the information for additional purposes.
The U. S. portion of the ocean station program was carried out by Coast Guard high endurance cutters (WHECs) from World War II onward. The program was terminated in June 1974 except for station Hotel which had been established in 1970. The rest of the stations had virtually outlived their usefulness because of improvements in both aircraft and in satellite weather prediction.
In order to better comprehend the
reasons behind the continuation of Hotel during a period when the rest of the stations were being abolished, it is necessary to consider recent climatic situations. Numerous and severe storms struck New England in the winter of 1968-69, and particularly harsh ones paralyzed New York and Boston. The National Weather Bureau (now the National Weather Service) had given little warning of the storms and blamed its failure on abnormal weather conditions which migrated north from near
Cape Hatteras. The Weather Bureau indicated that it did not receive sufficient information inputs to permit accurate forecasting.
The resulting deaths and loss of property prompted congressional calls for some sort of weather ship in the vicinity of Cape Hatteras. The result was the establishment of an environmental buoy approximately 120 miles east- southeast of Norfolk (at 36° 30' North, 73° 30' West) to supply information for coordination with data from a ship to be positioned at 38° 00' North, 71° 00' West (about 200 miles east-southeast of Cape May, New Jersey).
The position of the vessel (which was dubbed Hotel in maintenance of the phonetic alphabetic designations of weather stations) is particularly important in that it is influenced by both coastal weather and the effects of the Gulf Stream. To further guard against the unwarned advance of weather during the hurricane and winter seasons, Hotel is manned continuously from 1 August-1 March each year.
Ocean stations have been described as "44,000 square miles of bad weather,” because of their environmental conditions and the fact that stations in the Atlantic and Pacific were all squares of just over 200 miles on a side. These dimensions allowed the vessel some room to maneuver through adverse weather while still remaining on station. Because of the critical positioning of Hotel, however, its operational area is a circle with a 15-mile radius. Thus, the vessel must ride out even the most severe weather in order to provide optimum information. Unlike the original ocean stations, whose principal function was assistance to aircraft, OWSH was established primarily as a weather observation platform. Whereas various cutters alternated on the other stations, only one would have the primary assignment to OWSH. The ship first selected as Hotel’s keeper was the USCGC Gresham.
The Gresham was originally built as the USS Willoughby (AGP-9) at Lake Washington near Seattle in 1943. She served as a Navy motor torpedo boat tender until being turned over to the Coast Guard in 1946. With her new name and white paint, the Gresham joined the other Coast Guard cutters of her class (311 feet long, 2,800 tons) in serving on ocean station duty. She also spent a tour as part of Coast Guard Squadron Three in Southeast Asia. Departing San Francisco for the last time in early 1970, the Gresham headed for her new homeport of Norfolk and the beginning of her duties on OWSH.
The Gresham departed Norfolk’s Little Creek Amphibious Base for the first Hotel patrol on 19 February 1970. With in-port periods limited to seven days (other East Coast WHECs served as her monthly reliefs) and the months of April, May, June, and July off station, the Gresham faced a schedule which called for 210 days underway in her first year of operation out of Norfolk. The crew was over-manned so that—in theory, at least—men would be able to rotate deployments, and not all crew members would be compelled to make all patrols. The Gresham.'s schedule was nonetheless harsh. The extended deployments, combined with the seemingly endless routine, tended to create crew morale problems.
The Gresham was on station at Christmas 1970. The Coast Guard cutter Cherokee (WMEC-165), also homeported in Norfolk, provided the Gresham with gifts from families and additional supplies (including 80 pounds of fudge and 1,200 cookies made by Gresham wives). At Christmas in 1972, the Russian oceanographic vessel Ernst Krenkel exchanged Christmas gifts with the Gresham's crew in a display of international goodwill.
Because of the Gresham's nearly single-purpose existence, a special weather radar with a range of 250 miles was installed in order to facilitate the detection of weather patterns. The installation was accomplished in the spring of 1972, and by the end of the year a protective fiberglass dome had sprouted atop the Gresham’s flying bridge. It made her particularly distinguishable from the other 311-foot cutters in the Coast Guard’s fleet. The Gresham’s 5-inch gun mount was removed because her special assignment reduced the need for military readiness.
On 21-22 March 1973, a massive, violent storm moved offshore after creating havoc along the Virginia and North Carolina seacoasts. The winds strengthened and seas built until the MV Norse Variant found her hatch cover ripped away and flooding occurring in the forward holds as she steamed some 150 miles northeast of Cape Henry. The Norse Variant was a 54l-foot, 13,000-ton ship which had loaded coal in Norfolk and departed on the 21st for Glasgow. The very fact that a ship the size of the Norse Variant found herself in such straits is indicative of the strength of the storm. In the early afternoon, the master sent out urgent requests for help as his ship began to sink in a position approximately 70 miles west of ocean weather station Hotel. The Gresham copied the Norse Variant's broadcasts and attempted to steam to assistance. At the time of the initial transmission, the Gresham reported the weather as "Wind 010/77 knots gusting to 80, seas 130/25 feet, and 040/35 feet with one mile visibility.” Despite this, the Gresham made every effort to turn stern to the monstrous waves and proceed to the Norse Variant. Five hours later the Gresham sent the message which prefaced this Professional Note and advised that she was compelled to maintain a northeasterly heading for her own safety. The severe weather also resulted in the loss of one of the Gresham’s 26-foot motor surfboats and some flooding forward from seawater entering through a vent duct.
The Gresham did not hesitate long, however, for the Norse Variant sank quickly, and a multi-day, multi-service (Coast Guard, Air Force, Navy) air and sea search netted only one survivor from the ship’s crew of 30. That search also located some debris from the MV Anita which had departed Norfolk within hours of the Norse Variant and had been bound for Germany with a load of coal.
Improvements in aircraft and satellite weather forecasting have put most Coast Guard cutters out of the ocean station business. But the cutter on station Hotel can earn her keep when ships run into the sort of weather shown above.
The 20,000-ton Anita and her crew of 27 were never heard from again.
The Gresham survived the storm that apparently took two ships and 56 persons to their deaths and finished out her patrol. Almost two years prior to the Norse Variant disaster, the tanker Texaco Oklahoma broke apart and sank east- southeast of Cape Henry and left an oil slick that extended some 50 miles. The subsequent five-day search for survivors of that vessel also employed many services, including the Gresham and some merchant vessels. In October 1970, the Gresham assisted the MV Saab in an unsuccessful search for a man overboard, an incident which was repeated by the MV S.A. Weltevreden in January 1973.
On several other occasions, vessels manning station Hotel have provided medical assistance to merchant vessels, served as communications relay stations for search operations, stood by vessels in need of escort, and assisted in restoring stricken vessels to seaworthiness. The Hotel ship has even participated in aircraft emergency assistance, and the USCGC Absecon (WHEC-374) engaged in a fruitless two-day search in December 1971 for a downed Navy aircraft while manning Hotel during one of the Gresham’s in-pott periods.
The Gresham was finally decommissioned 25 April 1973. In light of the reduction of the rest of the ocean station program, the USCGC Taney (WHEC-37) was selected to take over the Gresham’s duties. She was built in Philadelphia in 1935-36 and has the distinction of being the only ship still on active duty with U. S. forces that was in action at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. The Taney (327 feet long, 2,400 tons) also saw action in Southeast Asia and was home- ported on the West Coast prior to her move to Norfolk.
Although the Taney continues to serve on most of the OWSH patrols, the availability of additional vessels (as a result of the termination of the other ocean stations) has allowed the Taney slightly longer periods in port than those first experienced by the Gresham. During most of the month of July, the Taney must be able to proceed to sea within 24 hours should weather conditions warrant her deployment prior to her normal on-station date of 1 August.
Station Hotel is likely to exist for years to come. The peculiar movement of weather along the Gulf Stream north of Cape Hatteras limits the practicality of using other methods to obtain the data necessary to accurately predict weather for the Northeast United States. The Weather Service indicated at the conclusion of Hotel’s first year of operations that the station was providing valuable information not available from other sources. Additionally, Hotel provides a working platform for oceanographic studies as well as being continuously available, should the need arise, to assist mariners in distress.
Submersibles with Panoramic Visibility
By Howard R. Talkington, Head, Ocean Technology Department, Naval Undersea Center, San Diego
velop submersibles with transparent pressure hulls.
The fact that transparent hull materials such as acrylic, glass, and glass ceramic also are much lighter than their metallic counterparts provides the additional advantages of relatively small size and weight. The transparent hulls pro-
Over the last few years several manned submersibles have been developed that provide a means to carry out oceanographic research, undersea biological and geological investigations, and to perform search, salvage, rescue, and undersea engineering tasks. For those manned submersibles, external
sensors and manipulative devices serve as man’s ears and hands, but he doesn’t need remotely-controlled devices to replace his eyes. In fact, the primary reason the man needs to be on-site below the surface is to be able to see his underwater environment directly. Thus, it became desirable for the Navy to de-
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vide primary buoyancy, rather than being the heaviest weight in the craft. These submersibles can now operate to continental shelf depths, and current research on new materials is providing hulls good to 1,000-meter operating depths and shows promise of transparent hull submersibles that will be able to operate even deeper.
Small, agile submersibles with panoramic visibility are ideal vehicles for carrying men and equipment on ocean reconnaissance and on missions as far down as the floor of the sea. The maneuverability and visibility of such vehicles allow the crews to operate in close proximity to objects they must investigate, modify, or retrieve. There are similar advantages when the vehicles are used in support of diver operations. They are also effective in the observation and pursuit of aquatic life. Only through continuous visual and sonar contact can the performance of sea lions, porpoises, or whales be evaluated in deep ocean monitoring and training. The size of these vehicles permits launching and retrieval from small support ships, reducing the overall cost of operations. Furthermore, they can be shipped quickly via fixed-wing aircraft to any place in the world.
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Transparent materials such as acrylic, massive glass, and transparent ceramic offer advantageous characteristics when applied to submersible systems because of their great strength, light weight, and transparency.
►Strength: Because of their innate characteristics, these materials are very strong under compression—a desirable attribute in the deep ocean. Compression loads increase with depth and remove any tensile loads that may have originally acted upon the spheres due to installation or handling prior to deep dives. With proper protection, even the brittleness of massive glass can be overcome. Neither acrylics nor ceramics have the brittleness problems of glass.
►Weight: When used as a pressure hull, these light materials have great advantages over metal (steel, titanium, or aluminum) hulls. When assembled into a submersible, hulls made of nonmetallic materials provide the primary buoyancy and do not require large amounts of
additional buoyancy (in the form of gasoline floats, glass floats, or syntactic foam) in order to approach the needed neutral system buoyancy as do the metallic hulls.
► Transparency: Rather than having to rely on electronic or acoustic imaging (which can just as well be provided to the surface by a remote-controlled vehicle), or having to use small and restricted viewing ports, a transparent hull provides the great innovation of allaround (panoramic) viewing. A transparent hull especially gives the undersea operator a feeling of truly being on the site or within the environment of his operations.
The first successful manned, deepdiving, free-swimming submersible was the Trieste I. This submersible was an innovation since, for the first time, men were able to dive into the depths of the seas in the comfort and safety of a one- atmosphere pressure hull. But because the hull was heavy steel, it required a large gasoline-filled float to give the vehicle an overall neutral buoyancy. The steel pressure hull had one 10-cm. diameter viewing port for undersea observations. The Trieste I was about 20 meters long and weighed about 50,000 kg. Since Trieste I, many other submersibles have been built having various trade-off advantages in depth capability, interior spaciousness, mission time, and working tool capability. Each is made to provide the simplest, smallest, and lightest weight system for its particular application. However, submersibles with steel, aluminum, or even titanium hulls are still large, heavy, clumsy, difficult to maneuver, and limited in visibility. Original work in developing the application of acrylic plastic for submersible windows and pressure hulls was conducted at the U. S. Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory, Port Hueneme, California and the U. S. Naval Missile Center, Point Mugu, California.
The first submersible to use the transparent pressure hull was the Hikino, developed at the U. S. Naval Weapons Center, China Lake, California. Limited by its plexiglass hemispheres to shallow depths of 10 meters, the Hikino nevertheless demonstrated a great advance of all-around visibility for undersea operations.
Makakai
The first fully operating and certified submersible with an acrylic hull is the NEMO. The NEMO (Naval Experimental Manned Observatory) is a self- contained submersible with a one- atmosphere environment. It has an operating depth of 183 meters and carries a crew of two (an operator and an observer). In addition to the crew, the vehicle can carry a payload of 225 kg. The pressure hull is constructed from acrylic plastic and has an outside diameter of 1.66 meters with a wall thickness of 6.25 cm. The NEMO was developed by the Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory (NCEL) Port Hueneme, California, and is now operated by Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, Texas.
The Kumukahi employed an acrylic plastic pressure hull. This vehicle was designed to operate with one pilot and one observer to depths of 100 meters in support of the scientific programs of the Oceanic Institute. It was fabricated from 3.175-cm. acrylic plates that were heated and pressed into spherical molds. Unfortunately a handling accident during proof testing damaged the hull and limited its operational depth to 30 meters. This craft, like the Hikino, provided a few dives to demonstrate the usefulness in a submersible of all-around visibility. But like the Hikino, it has never been certified by either the U. S. Navy or the American Bureau of Shipping for continued manned operations.
Mr. Edward Link, in cooperation with ALCOA, has developed for the Smithsonian Institution the Johnson- Sea-Link submersible. This undersea vehicle utilizes a copy of a NEMO acrylic sphere for the pilot and observer and also has a welded aluminum hull for a diver transport and lookout capability. This submersible is designed to operate to depths of 500 meters and to provide a team of three divers to do work to depths of 500 meters. A new acrylic hull is now under construction that will allow the Sea-Link to operate to about 1,000 meters.
Perry Oceanographic, Inc., of Riviera Beach, Florida, has developed the PCs. This acrylic-nosed, 5,500-kg. submersible, the first of a series of similar craft, is now in operation. It operates to a depth of 236 meters and can attain a maximum speed of four knots for two hours of continuous running. At one knot it can operate for eight to ten hours. Power is supplied by lead-acid batteries carried in side pods. It includes navigation and control equipment, a manipulator arm, and a communication system.
The submersible Deep View also is unique in that it makes the first use of massive glass in a manned submersible. The 5,261-kg. submersible has a nose made of a 1.13-m. diameter glass hemisphere, 2.858 cm. thick, joined to a 1.13-m., ring-stiffened cylindrical steel pressure hull. It is certified for operation to 183 meters. The first transparent hull submersibles were constructed exclusively of acrylic plastics and have an estimated maximum operational depth capability limit of 1,220 meters. Glass was selected for the Deep View project in an effort to begin development of transparent hull designs for depths exceeding those available in plastics. Most glass compositions have greater strength in compression than in tension.
The transparent hull submersible, Makakai (Hawaiian for "View of the Sea”) is a two-man, free-swimming submersible with an initial operating depth of 183 meters, developed at the Naval Undersea Center’s Hawaii Laboratory. The vehicle currently utilizes a NEMO- type transparent acrylic sphere as the pressure hull and affords the two operators an unobstructed panoramic view of the outside surroundings. The pressure hull is mounted on an aluminum tubular frame from which two pontoons are secured. Each pontoon contains trim and ballast tanks as well as lead-acid batteries used for the power supply. Two cycloidal thrusters which operate like paddle wheels propel the vehicle at a cruising speed of 0.5 to 0.75 knots with a maximum speed of three knots. These thrusters provide four-degree-of-freedom propulsion for the vehicle. The vehicle has an operating endurance of six hours at cruising speed. The Makakai is a culmination of a number of programs at the Naval Undersea Center including the development of transparent pressure hulls, cycloidal propellers for submersibles, pressurized electronics, and soft- line data transmission systems to eliminate or reduce through-hull penetrations.