Victorious

Did you ever wake up at 4 AM and have so many thoughts in your head you just couldn’t go back to sleep? That was last night. I was thinking about two submarines. The USS Pittsburgh SSN 720 which is currently preparing for decommissioning and the USS San Francisco SSN 711 which is in limbo […]

A Gathering of the Saints

This is the first post I have done in about a week. Summertime seems to be a tough time to write posts and looking back over the last eight years, July has always been the lowest response month for the blog. As someone who fills in for vacationing preachers in the summer, I am fully […]

There will always be that one love that defines you – Happy 711 Day

This is a love story. As someone who still considers himself a sailor, I also consider it one of my greatest love stories. (With apologies to my beautiful wife whom I have loved for almost as long as the one I write about today – to be fair, I would have never met her it […]

We have the watch – Saturdays, Sundays and Nights

I recently posted a story about sea trials and the USS San Francisco (SSN 711). My shipmate EM1/SS Jerry Stanek was a Plankowner on the boat and has remained a friend for over 39 years. We don’t see each other much anymore but still stay in touch. I mentioned that Jerry has a copy of […]

SEA TRIALS – TESTING THE BOAT AND THE CREW

SEA TRIALS – TESTING THE BOAT AND THE CREW Out of the vast cauldron of experiences related to being a Submariner, memories of one experience on submarines normally dominates above all the rest for someone who was a Plankowner of a sub. Sea Trials I have a lot of memories of the sea trials on […]

I left my heart… on the San Francisco

Oro en Paz, Fierro en Guerra – The San Francisco Story (Post #711) Over the years, I have heard many submariners say that a boat changed their life. For some, it was because the boat was their qualification boat. The completion of a hard and grueling period in their life when they were required to […]

Get in line you useless pollywog! Prepare to meet King Neptune!

The world is filled with pollywogs and Shellbacks There were a number of very old traditions observed when I was a sailor so many years ago. One of the most significant was explained to me in great detail on the 8th of February 1974 on the USS George Washington (SSBN 598) Blue crew. The submarine […]

Can the Groundhog see his shadow underwater?

Homesick Once upon a time on a submarine far, far away (USS San Francisco to be exact) a number of us were homesick for the place we had originally called home. In this case, it was Western Pennsylvania. The 711 boat was a hard working boat and once we hit our homeport in Pearl Harbor, […]

Would you do it again?

Would you do it again? As I have written before, so many people have the same reaction when you tell them that you were a Submariner. “Oh, I could never do that.” You just give them a certain smile of understanding and know that they are probably right. It takes a certain kind of crazy […]

“In my spare time, I went to Harvard”… how they kept from being bored on a boomer in ’65

November has been submarine month at theleansubmariner. Probably a large part of that is the nostalgia of looking back over the last 45 years and my own experiences on the boats. I got a chance to share some of my memories as well as stories from the archives that highlighted submarine development since the early […]