The Titanic and the Open Ocean, Ruminations

Navy Flashbacks 

I only gasp now, after 36 years, at the expanse and depth of the Atlantic Ocean, which I crossed several times in the Navy.

Once, while crossing eastward to England, we came upon a research vessel with a deployed platform, and we had to delete all logs and data about it because they were still in the early months of the Titanic's discovery on the ocean floor, and they wanted to protect their find from treasure hunters, I would suppose. We complied.

The ocean route that is shortest to England steams along the exact same line of latitude now as it did then. But even though we often traveled common tracks, over my 5 years I crossed many deep oceans and seas where you wouldn't see a surface contact/ship for days.

You'd step out on deck and imagine you were in a lifeboat instead of a ship, with the horizon everywhere. And I always knew the current water depth, both because I was the Combat Information Center's (CIC) Chart Petty Officer who corrected and updated every chart before we used it and because we maintained our ship's navigational plot in CIC to ensure concurrence with the Quartermaster's plot on the bridge. But the depth never bothered me then.

Now? I had to stop watching Professor T on PBS because the episode was about treachery on the open ocean, and I was suddenly struck by the depth and expanse, and a shiver ran up my spine.

And to put a finer point on this: when I came aboard the Tico, and Lawson went AWOL, I was technically replacing the Operations Specialist (Norton) who went missing on the aft lookout. He either fell overboard, jumped, or was pushed. The seas were calm, so falling overboard was unlikely. It's possible he jumped, committing suicide out of job stress, but unlikely. He had supposedly been a loan shark. So there could have been a murderer on board. And since most of his loans were to guys I shared a berthing space with...

Every ship has yearly casualties of one sort or another.