Page 22 - Demo

30ties had been changed. I think that the new navigating officer had been the torpedo officer and was not exactly at the top of his game when we sailed out of Gosport. I was standing next to him as we set off and listened to the messages from the Captain up top describing which buoys we were passing. The navigator looked at the chart and tried to make sense of it. I pointed out that we had Decca and would he like me to use it to take fixes. This was a great relief to him, and I plotted our position all the way out to wherever we were going.We cruised about for the next few days checking out a variety of pieces of equipment after the refit while periodically the Captain appeared and shouted 60 feet or something similar and we crashed dived to that depth. As he shouted, he started a stopwatch and when we levelled at the required depth, he stopped it and called out the time. This started at something like one minute five seconds. He then cursed everyone in the crew for being so useless and asking if they all wanted to die. Everyone looked a bit shame faced but as he shouted at everyone all the time and always appeared horribly grumpy I am not sure that much came of it. I quickly learnt to keep myself out of the way when these drills were practised. The first thing that went wrong was that we had a problem with the snort mast. This fed air into the diesel engines when we were submerged. Obviously, the intake on the mast had to be above the surface of the water but even so it presented only a small target for radar or visual sightings. If the intake went below the surface, a valve shut and for a few moments the air inside the submarine fed the engine. The pressure drop was huge and apparently, submariners have more problems with their ears than aircrew. In our case the valve did not work properly as when a wave came over the intake, water poured into the engine room. I can%u2019t remember whether they fixed this or whether we just stopped snorting.