Memories of the ICEX 2014:

• Light meals on the submarine. The supply officer hadn’t ordered enough food for the entire underway, so the meals were rationed. The supply officer wasn’t happy. The XO kept telling him to think of it as a grand adventure, like Shackleton’s trip to the north pole. I don’t think that helped. There was no creamer for the coffee when I arrived, and they ran out of ketchup before I left. However, there was lots of pudding for dessert.
• Great meals at the ice camp.

  

• Washing the dishes at the ice camp for my first dinner there.
• Teaching the Air Force Colonel that was with Lt. Gen. Handy (Commander Alaska Command – visiting the camp for two days) to play cribbage. And then losing to him. I mean. The Air Force. And new at the game. At least he didn’t skunk me.
• The Army Lt. Col. that was with the general telling the submarine crew that he couldn’t spend the night onboard because his wife forbid him to get underway on the submarine.
• The three-star general standing on the ice for over three hours to just watch the submarine surface without a warming hut. Did I mention he was a three-star?
• The outside “urinal” boxes at the edge of camp. Cold during the day. Even colder at night. With a threat of polar bears. It made one think twice if you could get back to sleep or really needed to pee.
• Unheated outhouses. But not for peeing.
• Prudhoe Bay. No alcohol. No restaurants. Nothing to do but try to leave.
• Will calling me at 3 in the morning. It was 7 here and he was just calling me back.
• The XO waking me up at 8am Sunday morning (I had been awake until 2am teaching one of the watchstanders about presetting torpedoes) telling me that “the helicopter will be here in 15 minutes, you need to be packed and on the helicopter.”
• No showers at the ice camp.
• The totally cool hole in the ice in the command hut. The team melted the hole when they set up the camp.  The water beneath the camp was 2 miles deep. I was going to bring water back from the camp, but I forgot. I was more focused on trying to get to Anchorage and not have to spend the night in Prudhoe Bay. Did I mention there was no alcohol at Prudhoe Bay.
• Falling off the sled behind the snowmobile on the ride from the airplane to the camp. It was an amusing start to my trip there.  At least the chief on the back of the snowmobile thought so.
• Not seeing any polar bears. But always wondering when taking a leak at night if that white blur in the distance (in the dark) had been there earlier in the day.

I’m sure I didn’t nearly cover it all…. but enough for the night.

I flew to the ice camp and spent time onboard the USS Hampton during ICEX 2014. Below is the official navy news release about the camp:

From Commander, Submarine Forces Public Affairs

NORFOLK (NNS) — Commander, Submarine Forces (COMSUBFOR) announced an early end to Ice Camp Nautilus on March 23. The ice camp was a temporary structure built and operated especially for Ice Exercise 2014 (ICEX-2014).

Personnel at Ice Camp Nautilus, which is built into the ice floe north of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, began a careful breakdown of the camp Sunday.

ICEX-2014 began March 17 and was scheduled to continue through March 30. However, large shifts in wind direction created instabilities in the wind-driven ice floes of the Arctic Ocean, and these changes in the prevailing winds between March 18th and March 20th led to multiple fractures in the ice near the camp. These cracks prevented the use of several airfields used for transporting personnel and equipment to the ice camp. The rapidly changing conditions of the ice, along with extremely low temperatures and poor visibility hampered helicopter operations and made sustaining the runway potentially risky.

The Virginia-class attack submarine USS New Mexico (SSN 779) and the Los Angeles-class attack submarine USS Hampton (SSN 767) will continue to gather data and conduct ice-related exercises until they transit out from under the ice.

Submarines have conducted under-ice operations in the Arctic regions in support of inter-fleet transit, training, cooperative allied engagements and operations for more than 50 years. USS Nautilus (SSN 571) made the first submerged transit to the North Pole in 1958. USS Skate (SSN 578) was the first U.S. submarine to surface through arctic ice at the North Pole in March 1959. Since those events, the U.S. Submarine Force has completed more than 120 Arctic exercises with the last being conducted in 2012. The last ice camp was established in 2011. Since 1987, most of these have been conducted in conjunction with Royal Navy submarines.

For more news from Commander, Submarine Force, U.S. Atlantic Fleet, visit www.navy.mil/local/sublant/

Last weekend I flew to Anchorage, Alaska and then to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. From Prudhoe Bay we got on a small plane and flew about 150 miles north and landed on the ice. I spent the night on the camp. From the ice camp, I boarded a helicopter to fly out to meet the submarine for what was supposed to be a 10 day underway.

However, late this week, the ice around the camp started to break up a little bit, and the exercise was finished early. When we returned to the camp we could see the huge section of open water where the runway had been before we got underway (the camp had made a second runway when the first was lost). Here are some pictures from the camp:

 

 

 

I started regularly blogging three years ago. Yes I know, I actually started this blog in November of 2010; but, I didn’t post anything between November 2010 and March 2011.  I have written 340+ posts in that time, and recently just passed 100,000 written words

It is fun to go back and look at what I have written over the past couple of years. It is nice to see that my posts have gotten no more interesting nor have they stopped jumping around on random topics. But that is ADHD for you.  Even though I can’t focus on writing on just one or two topics, I have been able to keep posting in the blog. Even if only one or two people actually read it.

Over the next three years, I will try to write another 100,000 words. I’ll try to post more pictures. I’ll continue to not try to focus on writing on one subject. That would be too boring anyway.