USS Philadelphia Homeward Bound

The Navy has released five pictures of USS Philadelphia (SSN 690) pulling into Souda Bay, Crete. To view the thumbnails, you can click here and type in "SSN 690" into the "Photo Search" tab in the upper left. You can also view the individual pics by clicking here, here, here, here, and here. From each image, you can then click on the hi-res versions of the pictures.

It looks like they did a pretty good job on the cosmetic repairs when they were in port in Bahrain after their collision last month; here is what she looked like then:



And here's how she looks now:



It's actually hard to see much damage. There's clearly some visible repair work that's been done to the starboard fairwater plane. I knew that the rudder had taken a beating, so I wanted to see how that looked. I blew up the "after" picture above to focus on the rudder, and here's what I got:



It looks like there's some missing paint, but I really couldn't tell much else. I'm sure they wouldn't have let her get underway, though, if the rudder wasn't fully functional.

Some interesting details can be gleaned from the pictures for non-submariners. In the "after" picture above (and here) you can see submarine linehandling in action on the bow. One sailor is throwing a "heavie" to the pier, another is wrapping the line around the cleat, and the capstan is raised. (As an aside, submarine linehandling is often very comical -- we don't do it too much, and it shows. As often as not, you end up with the "heavies" wrapped around some overhead line, or 5 or 6 Sailors scratching their heads trying to figure out how to double the lines.) Another photo shows the "shifting colors" ceremony -- as the colors are raised on the stick aft of the sail, the flag on the bridge is taken down, while all hands salute. This is done immediately after the ship is "moored" (all four lines on, but not necessarily finished being secured).

If someone smarter than me sees any visible damage remaining (for example in this picture, which shows the towed array housing) let me know.