Tales from the Sandbox - Holmes - Military Times

Epilogue

Looks like some sailors from the Freedom made it to the Cavs’ game after all.

Share This

Blogger, departing

CLEVELAND, OHIO – The Freedom used the first tug of its career today to ease its stern onto the lakefront pier, but only because the tug boat master wanted something to do.

“He called me on the radio, said in this real mopey voice, ‘man, I’ve been waiting for you guys for a long time,’ just like that,” laughed the Freedom’s skipper, Cmdr. Don Gabrielson. “So I thought we’d give him a job.”

No need for much fancy footwork tying up in Cleveland. The ship decelerated from warp speed, crossed through the breakwater and nosed towards a starboard-side mooring. But the eddies at the water’s edge were a little tricky. So with the slightest push from the wooden tug’s sloping bow, the Freedom was alongside a dock near the Great Lakes Science Center, the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame and the Cleveland Browns’ stadium. The ship plugged into shore water and power. The porta-potties in the helo hangar were wheeled onto the flight deck, from which they’ll be discreetly emptied.

I rolled my clothes into my duffel bag and set the key to my cabin inside one of its fold-down desks. The Freedom is continuing on through its final Great Lake, Ontario, and then out the St. Lawrence Seaway into the Atlantic Ocean, the saltwater domain for which it was designed. But after an all-too-brief peek inside the most singular ship in the surface Navy, I was getting off. I paid my mess bill (via a check for $33.25, payable to the U.S. Treasury) ate a final lunch in the crew’s mess (hamburgers; delicious) shook a few hands and walked down the brow into the City of Industry.

The crew of the Freedom doesn’t get to fly home this afternoon, however. After some brief liberty – tickets for tonight’s Cavaliers game are in high demand – the sailors must get back to running their amazing machine. I want to thank them again for their patience in dealing with Rob and me, two strange civilians with notebooks and cameras and no shortage of questions.

But I’m not ashamed to say that I’m really eager for a shower.

Share This

It’s like you’re there

Check out this 360 degree view of the ship’s Waterborne Mission Zone.

Share This

Underway at 44 knots

ABOARD THE FREEDOM – After a day, new parts flown in from who-knows-where and a heroic effort by the ship’s engineers, the Freedom’s engines roared back to life last night. I was in the wardroom pecking away on this laptop when the first generator spooled up, tickling the table and chairs like one of those airport massagers. The propulsion diesels followed. As I kept working, all the now-familiar hums and roars and whirrs and rattles returned.

To get away from the pier in Port Huron, the ship reversed the maneuver it used to dock. The Freedom angled its stern out from the dock and into the Saint Claire River, where the downstream current from Lake Huron grabbed the ship. It pirouetted with the flow of the river until the bow pointed south, then started down the channel.

I missed the river transit and Detroit, having worked feverishly and then collapsed into the rack. When I walked onto the bridge this morning the ship was entering western Lake Erie in the channel as part of a column of merchant vessels, with big cargo carriers ahead and astern of us. The captain came on the 1MC a few minutes later to announce that we’d be firing up the turbines and making another “full CODAG” run across the lake to get to Cleveland.

The whine of the turbines filled the ship. The crew of the Freedom is still experimenting with the water depths at which it can enter high speed, because they affect how well the ship’s bow can plane up. So after the ship chopped a few times on our existing course towards the Cleveland, it turned into the wind, like a carrier, to get a slight boost for the semi-planing hull. The trick worked and the Freedom took off like a rocket.

As I write this the ship is making a right turn from running at 44 knots – over 50 miles per hour – with a 75-knot wind over the forecastle. We expect to make it to Cleveland within the hour.

Share This

Gi-normous

PORT HURON, MICH. – Half the Freedom’s combined-diesel-and-gas powerplant are its two Rolls-Royce MT-30 turbine engines, which ride deep under the waterline in a pair of enormous metal boxes. The ship’s engineering spaces are designed to be unmanned, but when the engines were powered down yesterday, Chief Gas Turbine Systems Technician (Electrical) Raymond Quezada opened up the box on the starboard turbine to show us around.

I suggested the MT-30 seemed bigger than the familiar General Electric LM 2500 turbines that power most of the Navy’s surface combatants.

“Oh man, it’s gi-normous,” he agreed. Quezada described how two sailors with whom he’d served on a destroyer came aboard the Freedom in Milwaukee to check out his new engine room, and they were blown away.

“Whenever people say to me, ‘well, on the LM 2500, it’s this,’ I have to stop them,” Quezada said. “This is nothing like the LM 2500.”

Operating together, the two MT-30s generate about 100,000 horsepower, which can combine with the output from the ship’s two Fairbanks-Morse main diesels, if so directed by a sailor at a console on the bridge. The engines give the ship’s water jets the power they need to vacuum in seawater and then blast it aft, yielding one crew nickname for the Freedom: a giant jet-ski. The ship can rise two feet out of the water at high speed.

Ticonderoga-class cruisers and Arleigh Burke-class destroyers have a set of four LM 2500s, but no propulsion diesels, to drive their traditional twin propellers. Those ships can make 30 knots on about 80,000 horsepower for cruisers and 100,000 for destroyers, but they’re much bigger — more than 9,000 tons, compared to the Freedom’s 3,000. If destroyers are Adm. Arleigh Burke’s “greyhounds of the sea,” the Freedom is the electric jackrabbit they chase around the track. 

  Quezada likes the MT-30s because they’re completely self-contained, he said, and they run diagnostic tests on themselves when they start up. The downside, compared to LM 2500s, is that the Rolls-Royce engines use a lot more fuel. But the Navy understood that when it designed the ship, he said.

“Your little Hyundai gets great gas mileage at 60 or 65 miles per hour,” Quezada said, “but your Chevy Corvette or your Dodge Viper gets a lot more power. It uses more gas, but you get what you pay for.”

Share This

“How do you like me now, pirate?”

PORT HURON, MICH. – We walked up to the 02 level after lunch to see the Rolling Airframe Missile launcher, one of the Freedom’s two permanent onboard weapons, along with its 57mm gun on the forecastle. The wind had checked back from its earlier clip this morning, but it still bore the perfume rising off the Esso refinery across the river in Canada.

Chief Firecontrolman Jason Dempsey took us through the empty spaces atop the Freedom’s aluminum superstructure, where it will carry the 30 mm guns and the Non-Line of Sight missiles of its surface warfare mission package. Along with the RAM launcher, these weapons will be what give the Freedom its ability to deal with targets on the surface, although as one blogger has suggested, the ship’s diluvial wake is just as devastating against small boats.

The skipper, Cmdr. Don Gabrielson, agreed that the ship’s high speed and maneuverability are two potent weapons. He said he could easily picture a situation where he repelled a swarm of small-boat attackers by slicing the Freedom in circles or S-turns, then forcing his attackers to chase him through the wake.

“How do you like me now, pirate?’” he said.

“I know people go, y’know, ‘well somebody in a Boghammar can go 50 knots and outrun you,’ and I say, he can’t go 50 knots in the same kind of seas I can. I’ll destroy him! I’ll tip him over! Plus I’ve got a 30mm gun as part of the equation?”

He praised the laser rangefinder and electro-optical sights on the ship’s 57mm gun. “What people don’t realize is that, if I can see somebody out there, I can touch him.”

Gabrielson has heard the critics who say LCS is under-armed. I mentioned to him that it’d be cool to see a future copy of the Freedom equipped with a SPY-1F Aegis radar and vertical launch tubes, which has reportedly interested the Israeli Navy. He agreed, but he said a traditional-SWO preoccupation with VLS and strike misses the point of LCS. There are hundreds of VLS tubes for Tomahawk or SM-2 missiles aboard destroyers and cruisers in the surface force, Gabrielson said, but the Freedom wasn’t designed to take over their missions.

“I need a ship to keep the mosquitoes away from those other ships,” he said, pointing to the deck.

Instead of being an ominous gray presence on the horizon, the Freedom can get in close in foreign ports to provide a different kind of deterrence, Gabrielson said. It can engage foreign navies or mariners or just dissuade them from going against American wishes. If there’s a major problem that the Freedom can’t handle, it can call the fleet, he said.

“We can say, ‘hey, you guys wanna play? We’ll play.’ And half a day later the other guys show up,” Gabrielson said.

Share This

Downtime

PORT HURON, MICH. – The chemical plumes from the Esso refinery across the Saint Claire River looked lovely this morning from the flight deck of the Freedom, framed against just a touch of sunrise pink on the eastern horizon. The sky above still is a permanent layer of steel wool, however, and the wind off the river still hits you like a razor.

Clusters of technicians in Carhart jackets and baseball caps have been coming aboard the ship this morning to help repair the generators and main propulsion diesels. We now have a replacement valve and four spares from Fairbanks-Morse to fix the one that cracked on the port engine late Monday. Two men in denim shirts from Isotta-Franchini are at work in Auxiliary Room 1 on the generators, tiptoeing over a thousand tiny disassembled parts laid out on the deck.

The skipper, Cmdr. Don Gabrielson, came on the 1MC this morning to try to set straight the mess-deck intelligence about what would happen today. I’d heard that we would be underway by dawn this morning, which didn’t happen, and I’d also heard the ship wouldn’t sail at all. The real goal, Gabrielson said, was to get two generators operating by 1300 and then cast off. The diesels are operational again, he said, and a pair of working generators would give us one to power the ship’s hotel load and one to keep on standby. The speed limit down the Saint Claire River is only about 10 knots, so the Freedom probably wouldn’t use its gas turbines anyway, although it could. Other 1MC announcements this morning have extinguished the smoking lamp as trucks come up the pier to deliver fuel.

The crew can’t relax much, even with the ship tied up. Everyone swept or mopped or polished during Cleaning Stations earlier, which, as our gouge sheet calls it, “is an all-hands evolution.” The interior spaces on the Freedom gleam like an operating room. I know it’s a new ship, but the sailors seem to have really taken to the all-hands-keep-it-clean mentality, because they realize there aren’t extra people to do the job.

When sailors do have down time, the Freedom has the nicest accommodations in the Navy for a ship this size. Rob and I saw them last night when we were hanging out in an enlisted berthing space with some engineers – who were extremely cool, by the way, about showing us their stuff and being patient with Rob’s TV camera. (Nobody likes dealing with reporters, and I don’t blame them.) The sailors have roomy racks, with enough space to sit up and use a laptop computer, as well as their own head, shower and sink. The berthing space also has its own plasma TV, which, we learned, displays Dallas Cowboys football games.

We saw the ship’s gym, which is a dedicated space, unlike the makeshift workout rooms on many surface ships. It doubles as the barber shop. We also saw the crew’s lounge, which, for my money, is the nicest relaxation area on board the Freedom. It has a full rack of consumer-electronics goodies bolted to the deck, including a giant Sony Bravia plasma-screen TV; an XBox360; a Blu-Ray DVD player; and surround sound, complete with stereo speakers wired above the overhead pipes and cables. A retired sailor in Milwaukee with consumer electronics connections donated all the gear, we learned: the crew got the XBox; the chief’s mess got a PlayStation 3; and the wardroom has a Nintendo Wii.

But we’ve heard over and over that nobody has had time for video games.

Share This

Secure from mail buoy detail

PORT HURON, MICH. – I’ve heard that Mombassa, Kenya is one hell of a liberty port, and many sailors will swear by Boston, but I’m not sure that a Navy ship’s company has descended upon this small city before the Freedom’s sailors did tonight. A shore crane placed the ship’s brow by nightfall and the crew members who could take it are now on liberty; what was an already quiet littoral combat ship is lifeless tonight.

Rob and I walked down the brow a few hours ago to take in the local nightlife, but downtown Port Huron at 9 p.m. wasn’t quite Carnaby Street. Several of the ship’s crew members were making merry at the Military Street Music Bar. After two Miller Lites, we walked back to the ship.

Our unexpected liberty got me thinking about the lighter side of Navy life, and specifically that a certain aspect of life at sea — namely, the good-natured humiliation of newcomers – will die aboard the Freedom and its successors. To get an assignment aboard this ship, a sailor had to have at least one earlier sea tour; many have had more and almost everybody aboard is warfare-qualified. There are only two second-class petty officers in the entire Blue Crew, and both of them plan to take the E-6 test for the coming cycle, according to the XO, Cmdr. Kris Doyle.

With such a salty crew, there aren’t any unrated newcomers of whom the chiefs can make sport. There are many deckplate sea stories about assigning junior-most sailors to “mail buoy detail,” gearing them up in kapok jackets and flash hoods, handing them a pool skimmer, and telling them they’re in charge of snaring the “mail buoy” as the ship passes by. If they miss it, they’re told, nobody on the ship, even the captain, will get their mail from home, so the whole crew will be angry. There is no mail buoy, as the unlucky sailors discover when chief relieves them at the bow, wiping away tears of mirth. You can’t send a second-class petty officer for an “eye-dee 10 tango” form – the phonetic pronunciation of ID10T, i.e. “idiot” – or for a can of the mythical shipboard chemical known as “bulkhead remover.”

“Yeah, I don’t think anybody’s going to try that on here,” agreed Engineman 1^st Class (SW) Brad Vincent. “And if you do, there’s a very good chance it would backfire on you.” Rob asked him if there had been any pranks onboard the ship since it sailed from Marinette, but Vincent shrugged.

“We’ve been so tired nobody’s even tried anything.”

Share This

Detour

ABOARD THE FREEDOM – Nothing on a ship’s maiden voyage goes exactly as planned. After our fish-terrorizing run up Lake Michigan yesterday, and our transit through the Straits of Mackinaw, the Freedom came to a stop and launched a small boat to pick up a part it missed in Milwaukee. The ship had just set down its rigid-hulled inflatable boat, or RHIB, when I hit my rack last night. I was too worn out to stay on the bridge and watch the boat come back, but I knew it came back because I was jolted out of my blankets by the launch and recovery klaxon.

 The crews of the Navy’s first Littoral Combat Ship line the rails of the new USS Freedom as the ship is commissioned at Milwaukee.

After a sleepless night of strange ship noises and the clanking of out-of-sight machinery, I woke up to learn the part we’d brought aboard – something to do with our Inmarsat satellite antenna – didn’t work. What’s more, the ship had used up much more of its fuel than expected during our full-CODAG run. What’s more than that, a valve on the port diesel engine was cracked; the Freedom could still run both its diesels, but the engineers recommended babying the port engine until we could get a replacement valve. When I walked onto the bridge this morning, the crew had tricked the ship’s engine-control network into letting us make about 14 knots on our starboard diesel.

But the  hiccups were just getting started. After another stroll through the multi-mission area with the XO, Cmdr. Kris Doyle, a voice came over the 1MC announcing that three of the ship’s generators were offline. A lube oil leak meant the ship could only run one of its four diesel motors that deliver the “hotel load” powering our lights, the sensors, the networks, everything. The Freedom secured electricity in all “non-essential spaces,” meaning we’re using flashlights in our cabins and there were no soft drinks for lunch today in the mess. The continuous-loop showing of “The Bourne Ultimatum” in the crew’s mess was switched off.

Rob and I were talking with Chief Boatswain’s Mate Trevor Davis in the waterborne mission area – the stern section where the Freedom will launch and recover its unmanned watercraft – when the skipper, Cmdr. Don Gabrielson, walked down the ladder. Our itinerary was changing, he said. We would dock at Port Huron, Mich., just inside the northern mouth of the Saint Claire River, to pick up parts and refuel. This would add about a 12-hour delay to our trip.

Immediately, sailors all over the Freedom got on cell phones to make the arrangements for our unscheduled pit stop. Tugs needed to be organized; pier handlers were needed to meet the ship; a shore crane was needed to place the Freedom’s brow. And the Freedom’s navigation staff had to draw a plan from scratch to moor this 3,000-ton warship to a rock-wall dock against a downstream current of 3 knots. When Gabrielson briefed his bridge crew, he told them he wanted it to look like they had planned the stop in Port Huron all along.

As the day waned, they made it happen. All that was left was to pilot the ship through the narrow channel from Lake Huron into the Saint Claire River, under the bridge between Port Huron and Sarnia, Ontario, which, if memory serves, is the kissing capital of the world.

Working closely with the ship’s Great Lakes navigation consultant, Dan Hobbs, and the Freedom’s navigator, Lt. j.g. Shaina Hayden, Gabrielson himself took the ship’s helm. Land appeared along either side of us, then narrowed with each forward mile. Red and green buoys appeared, marking either side of the channel into the river, one not wide enough to permit two large ships to pass in either direction. The Freedom would have to ask a huge Great Lakes bulk carrier, the Canadian Enterprise, to cool out south of Port Huron so we could pass under the bridge and tie up.

Gabrielson and his bridge team lined up the Freedom towards a set of navigation lights on the Canadian shore that appear right on top of each other, but which are really hundreds of feet apart. When the top light shows just inches above the bottom light, a ship knows it’s true in the middle of the channel. If a pilot perceives some distance between them, he knows he needs to correct his course, as with the Fresnel lens pilots use to land on a carrier. The Freedom tracked through the buoys towards the lights before turning gently right under the bridge to Sarniac. The ship’s horn blew three times.

I stood on the starboard bridge wing looking out at Port Huron, a city that scrambles up to the very edge of the waterway with sheds and homes build out on poles over the river. It was another cold, iron-gray day on the Great Lakes. On the other side of the ship lay the chemical plants or refineries of Sarnia, where a few big lake merchant vessels were docked, loading or unloading.

Our tug appeared. Hobbs and Gabrielson radioed to ask its master to stand off in the center of the river, from which it could push us onto the pier, if needed. But under its own power, with an ailing port diesel engine, the Freedom wheeled crisply around from south to north, pointing into the current flowing from Lake Huron. Gabrielson had turned the ship upriver of its dock, and making only steerage with our diesels, we drifted lazily downriver for a few hundred feet. Then, aligned by the current, the ship’s thrusters angled right and pushed us gently against the dock.

The Canadian Enterprise, which materialized as a 730-foot brown bulker with an old-style forward pilothouse, passed us on its way up to Lake Huron. Hobbs thanked the ship for cooperating with our transit.

Port Huronites are evidently avid ship-watchers, and apparently word had spread about the odd-looking boat coming down the river. A crowd had formed in the parking lot near the pier where we tied up. A truck-mounted crane was pulling through the barricades. Policemen were setting up a cordon around the dock.  Gabrielson added a touch of rightward power and the Freedom nuzzled its bumpers up to the riverside dock.

“We’ve never had to use a tug yet,” the captain smiled.

Now the Freedom could plug into shore water and we could use the shiny sinks and heads in the cabins – theoretically. Now the ship could plug into shore power and restore the lights in the passageways. We could pick up the parts for the engine room and the satellite antenna. We could top off the fuel tanks.

It’s been several hours after we docked and none of those lifestyle improvements has come through yet. But when we were eating dinner a few minutes ago – cold sandwiches and salad with pudding for dessert – the lights in the crew’s mess whirred to life, and everybody cheered.

Share This

Mackinaw Bridge

ABOARD THE FREEDOM – Like a string of diamonds and rubies laid across an onyx plate, Mackinaw Bridge stretched dead ahead across the horizon. The Freedom was running dark, its bridge lit only by the electronic consoles, with no navigation lights outside the ship. We had passed several big merchant ships, and I asked the captain, Cmdr. Don Gabrielson, if he was worried the Freedom might be too stealthy for a transit in these waters, potentially full of smaller civilian craft that wouldn’t be expecting a sleek gray barracuda.

“Yeah, some of the tugs have said they couldn’t see us,” he said. He nodded towards a bulk ore carrier, like the Edmund Fitzgerald, passing on our starboard side. “We had that guy get on the radio a little while ago and say, ‘hey, what kind of ship is that?’ And we said, ‘we’re a U.S. Navy warship,’ and they said, ‘oh, that makes sense.’ They don’t see too many vessels up here going 40 knots this time of year.” Or ever.

Gabrielson acknowledged there was something of a learning curve for a salt-water crew to learn how to drive their ship on the Great Lakes. They have help, though, in the form of Dan Hobbs, a master mariner with 30 years’ experience piloting tankers from Duluth to the St. Lawrence, who served as the Freedom’s sea trials captain this summer in Marinette. Hobbs is riding from Marinette to Montreal to help the Freedom’s crew navigate through waters that are new to many of them, but which he knows almost entirely by heart.

Most Great Lakes captains are essentially bus drivers, he said, making so many trips between familiar ports that they can almost pilot their vessels from memory. Hobbs’ familiarity with the lakes has come in handy so far, and he was on the bridge as the Freedom approached Mackinaw. The ship needed to meet a small boat on the east side of the span to pick up a part, and just as we began to pass underneath, he recommended to the officer of the deck that she switch on the ship’s navigation lights. I can only imagine what it must’ve looked like for the drivers on I-75 to see a Navy warship materialize below from the dark.

Share This