Was Blind, But Now I See...

Occasionally here at TSSBP, I see a story on submarines that I'm like 99% sure is wrong, but there's enough of a chance that things have changed in the year I've been out of the Navy that I want to get more information before I mock and belittle the writers.

Such was the case yesterday, when I read the wire service story on the San Diego Fleet Week's "Sea and Air Parade". Here're the paragraphs that confused me:

"Ships that participated in the procession included an aircraft carrier, cruiser, guided missile destroyer, nuclear submarine and an amphibious assault ship.
"A crew of about 10 sailors stood at attention on the submarine deck, as onlookers waved and cheered the massive ship, most of it under water."

You see, the Sea and Air Parade mostly takes place on the downtown side of North Island (in this overhead picture, the Sub Base in to the left of the southwest corner of North "Island", and downtown is to the right, north of the curved bridge that goes to Coronado/North "Island"). For some reason, nuclear submarines never, ever go over to that side of the bay. So that's what had me confused. Had NR ended the prohibition against sending subs over to that side of the bay? I didn't figure that the writer would have misidentified some other type of ship as a submarine...

Today, my confusion was resolved. Because of the nuke-centrism of the U.S. Sub Force, I had forgotten about the good ship HMS Gotland, the Swedish diesel sub that is helping train our ASW forces in San Diego for the next year. They were the boat that got to take part in the parade, and hopefully they had a good time. Now, to the delayed mocking of the article. There are enough people with military experience in San Diego that the writers should be able to have someone fact-check their articles before publishing to catch such errors as mistaking a diesel boat for a nuclear one. I especially liked how they described the (relatively) tiny diesel boat as "massive". The Navy picture has a nice contrast between the size of the USS Ronald Reagan and the sub -- interestingly, if there was a one-on-one fight between the two ships, I'd rate it as a toss-up as to which one would be sunk first...

Bell-ringer 1153 03 Oct: A commenter lets us know that local SSNs have taken part in the Parade before:
"I was on board Salt Lake City when we participated in the parade of ships back in 2002 (also on a Saturday). We started out by buoy SD, waited for the parade to start then made the trip to the North side of the bay, turned around just prior to the bridge and came back. I think we had about 50 guys on board that day."