Pretty cool… You ever get to do this @Navynuke99…?
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I volunteered subs in the Nuclear Power training pipeline, but that was thwarted by the be all, end all of trump cards, The Needs Of The Navy. 1/3 of the electricians in my class went to Enterprise, who was headed to the yards for a refit (9/11, which happened 4 days after we graduated from the pipeline, delayed that a few months), 1/3 of my class went with me to the Reagan for precommissioning, and the last 1/3 got boats- one friend of mine (ranked lower in the class than me by the way,) got the USS Virginia, everybody else got 688’s or Boomers, and it was almost funny how many of the guys who requested attack boats got boomers, and vice versa. Almost.
The class before me got all the fun billets- one guy went to the Parche, one went to support for NR1, one to the Seawolf, one to the Connecticut, and a couple went to the Kamehaha. Lucky bastards.
The closest I got to anything even remotely arctic was passing through the Straits of Magellan, when we made the transit from Norfolk to San Diego. The original plan was to round Cape Horn, but it was dead middle of the South American winter, and when Nimitz had made the same trip three years previous, they’d taken several million dollars worth of damage in heavy storms off the Cape. So, through the Straits we went! Took I believe 3 days to make the trip, and it was bitter cold, but breathtakingly beautiful. A few shots I snagged from my photo friends:
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And an interview with our CO at the time Captain James Symonds, the best Commanding Officer I ever had the privilege of serving under:
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