Navy

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Update On The Failboat

It struck a reef , not the sandy bottom as was originally thought.  So now divers are going to have to cement busted parts of the reef to keep it from rolling around and damaging the reef even more.

20Feb2009 | Ramon Arjona | Comments Off | Continued
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Epic Failboat. Now with poop.

So the Port Royal crapped on Hawaii.  Quite literally.  This will mean that nobody’s getting any fresh tako from Keehi for a while.  Maybe it will also mean a giant super-tako, mutated beyond recognition, will climb out of the ocean and fight Godzilla.  Or maybe a bunch of them will die and then some people will get sick and die, too, because they ate tainted octopus.

I’ve decided that it’s much more fun to say “tako” than “octopus.”

I’ve also decided that I will not stoop to any “poop deck” jokes.  But you can go ahead and make your own.  I’ll wait.

11Feb2009 | Ramon Arjona | Comments Off | Continued
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Failboat Freed

After three days aground, the Port Royal is free, and damaged, and her commander is relieved of duty.

For your viewing pleasure, here’s the Port Royal in happier times, before she was run aground:

Port Royal Ceremony. With Jaunty Tune!

10Feb2009 | Ramon Arjona | Comments Off | Continued
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Look. It’s a failboat.

Here you will see the Honolulu Advertiser’s story on the Port Royal, a US Navy vessel that hit bottom near the Honolulu International Airport.  If you were flying into or out of Honolulu right now, you could see it firsthand.

In a similar story, the Connecticut hit bottom back before there were blogs or 24-hour news cycles, almost a hundred years ago.  Like the Port Royal, the Connecticut was some place she ought not to have been.  It’s too soon to tell but, probably like the Connecticut, this grounding will spell the end of the career of the captain of the Port Royal.  Unlike the Port Royal, the Navy tried to cover up the grounding of the Connecticut.  I like to think that today’s Navy is more averse to cover ups, but honestly it would be hard to cover up the big Aegis cruiser parked off the runway at Honolulu International Airport.  Maybe they could throw a tarp over it or something?

When a boat hits bottom it usually spells the end of the career of the ship’s captain.  While learning from failure is valuable, it seems to me that there are some mistakes that a person should be expected to always avoid and running aground is usually one of these.  You’d think it should be a problem we’ve solved, what with GPS and fancy sonar and all of that.  But captains are still human, just like they were a hundred years ago and it’s the captain, not the sonar or the GPS, that is responsible for grounding the boat.

I’m reminded of a friend of mine from a long time ago who was an enlisted guy in the Navy.  His job was to read the sonar on a submarine.  His boat was submerged, coming in toward Kauai, and he told the captain how close they were getting to the island.  The captain looked over this guy’s shoulder, read the sonar display wrong, and gave the order to keep going.  The submarine bumped into Kauai.  That was the last time this captain got to command a submarine, or any Navy vessel for that matter.  In his case, it was simple arrogance: thinking he knew more than the enlisted guy, even though the enlisted guy’s whole job was just to read that sonar display and report such things as, "Hey, Captain, we’re about to run into a big honking island."

One of the most important lessons you can learn in management is when to trust the people who work for you.  This is almost as important as learning, or remembering, that the boat should go on the water part, not the rock part.

8Feb2009 | Ramon Arjona | Comments Off | Continued