Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!sdd.hp.com!news.cs.indiana.edu!att!cbnews!cbnews!military From: budden@trout.nosc.mil (Rex A. Buddenberg) Newsgroups: sci.military Subject: Re: SUBS SINK TRAWLERS Keywords: submarine nucleair fishermen trawlers Message-ID: <1990Dec13.034449.20770@cbnews.att.com> Date: 13 Dec 90 03:44:49 GMT References: <1990Dec7.012627.2607@cbnews.att.com> <1990Dec11.020908.28175@cbnews.att.com> Sender: military@cbnews.att.com (William B. Thacker) Organization: Naval Ocean Systems Center, San Diego Lines: 63 Approved: military@att.att.com From: budden@trout.nosc.mil (Rex A. Buddenberg) The movie boat (Hunt for Red October) was the USS Houston impersonating the USS Dallas. Navy routinely wishes not to disclose damage details as it interprets that as providing readiness intel to the enemy. The policy occasionally gets carried to unreasonable extremes. Or at least USCG marine investigators often think so. To trawlers. First, lets not confuse them with trollers, boats that fish with hooks, generally for salmon and tuna. Trawlers generally come in a couple flavors: mid-water trawlers targeting species like hake (aka whiting). Midwater draggers can move at anywhere from 4 to ten knots. Their nets do not touch the bottom; the trawlmaster 'flies' the net at a controlled depth (either predetermined or coached by watching fishfinder gear). Bottom trawlers are precisely that -- they drag the trawl over the bottom and are rather omnivorous about what they bring up. Because of the difficulty in targeting a species, and the regulations we enforce on the foreigners in the US FCZ, bottom trawling is pretty much restricted to US flag boats in our waters. Bottom trawlers, as you might imagine, tend to lose their nets with greater frequency than midwater trawlers. They move slower whith nets out too: 1-4 knots. In both cases, trawlers tend to work on soundings -- rarely in water deeper than 100 fathoms. The northern half of the Bering Sea is shallow enough; so is a great deal of the FCZ (sorry: fisheries conservation zone -- 3-200 NM from the beach) on the Atlantic. The Pacific coast drops off fairly quickly so it's unusual for trawlers to work out of sight of land there. As for Europe, the North Sea is fairly shallow -- trawlers work throughout and oil rigs are routinely founded on the bottom. So is a goodly chunk of the Barents Sea -- approaches to the Northern Fleet's ports. Once you figure out where both trawlers and submarines operate in the same water column, it's pretty obvious where the accidents are likely to occur. The USS Houston accident was a bit of a fluke as SSNs (and SSBNs) generally head straight out to deeper water and submerge headed for even deeper water -- and away from trawler/towboat territory. BTW, submarine parts brought up on nets tend to be fairly benign. Things get exciting when it's unexploded ordnance like mines and torpedoes snagged by some poor bottom dragger. Sea story (you may key past if you want here....). Several years ago, we boarded a bottom trawler off the Oregon Coast. After checking all his life jackets and thumping all the fire extinguishers, I asked the skipper how he liked his Loran set -- he had what was then a fairly fancy rig with an X-Y plotter that he used to record trawl lines. Guy lit up and exclaimed that he'd paid for his new set the first day out. Seems he'd caught his net on something on the bottom (a 'pinnacle' is the canonical culprit) and lost it. Thumpy day and he couldn't get it then; so he marked the spot on his Loran/plotter and went home. A good trawl net costs over $10k, so it's definitely worth trying to get it back. Two weeks later, this guy drives back to his X-marks-the-spot and (so he claims) pulled the net up on the first grapnel cast. Rex Buddenberg