Back in the late 1970’s the submarine I was Navigator/Operations Officer in was simulating a Soviet sub (ORANGE forces) during a major exercise in the Atlantic Ocean when a hurricane blew through. The carrier was not having a good time and some of the smaller ships had to retire from the exercise because of storm damage.

Our Submarine Element Coordinator for the exercise coincidently happended to be the Commodore of our home Squadron so he was temporarily attached to the Carrier Battle Group (CVBG) staff and “got” to ride the carrier. After we returned to port we found out that he had been thrown across a room during a roll and broke his arm.

During one trip to periscope depth (P/D) to copy radio traffic and a NAVSAT (predecessor to GPS) pass I was OOD and thus on the periscope. Maintaining depth was impossible so we just broached the ship (popped to the surface without blowing main ballast tanks) and bobbed around for about half an hour.

During that time I saw several waves break over the top of the periscope, an estimated 40 feet above the surface of the ocean. We were rolling so badly that the NAVSAT pass failed because there was too much motion in the antenna for the computer to calculate accurate Doppler in the satellite signal.

Fortunately we successfully copied a pass later on as the seas died off a bit. Also fortunate was the timing of the P/D excursion – long enough after lunch that the galley was cleaned and stowed for sea. I recall a few of the crew with weak stomachs spent a lot of time in their racks during that storm. Other than that, we had no damage to the sub.