Don't know if you've heard this one or not.

During the Iranian Hostage Crisis (1980) we were sent to the Indian Oceanas a show of strength. Every week or so we'd kick the ships in gear and runaway from our Russian Escorts, they tended to sit on the horizon and followus around. When the Admiral gave the word we'd go to a Flank bell and seehow fast we could go, the Russians would follow for awhile and then dropback and go wait for us back at our station.

During one of these sprints, whales had been sighted, and shortly afterreaching 30+ knots we had a loss of pressure in the sonar dome. We hadapparently hit something and ripped the rubber covering. We did a veryquick stop and managed to get the hatch to the compartment shored up sothat it wasn't leaking, but were limited to 5 knots, if we went faster westarted leaking.

We limped over near the coast and sent a diver down to take a look.Unfortunately we were pitching and rolling to much and he wasn't able toidentify and fix the damage. The scuttlebutt was that he'd gotten to closeat the wrong time and the ship drove him into the bottom. That his partnerhad to rescue him. We managed to get permission to enter a port and againbe looked at. We needed a dry dock to make repairs, so here we sat limitedto 5 knots and looking for a dry dock.

Turns out we had options of going home, going to Scottland, or going to thePhillipines and having a floating dry dock meet us there from Guam. Lot ofscuttlebutt at the time on whether the floating dry dock could handle aship of our size but it was the only real choice if we wanted to be back onstation as soon as possible.

We limped at 5 knots to the Phillipines, and surprised the local "ladies"who knew the fleets schedule better than the Admirals did. After unloadingour weapons, and scaring the workers by running an unannounced fire drillduring the off load, we were finally put into the dock and floated. Itworked although we did stick out a bit.

It took them 3 weeks to repair us, in the meantime we ran around theisland, being typical sailors. Amazes me that we survived, this was duringthe time when martial law was still in effect and any one caught on thestreets after 1:00 am would be shot then questioned. Stories abound ofspending the night in dumpsters when caught out side after 1:00.