Our route under the North Pole; from the Bering Straits to Iceland. The Captain left the boat, and flew to Washington. The Executive officer took command and we continued the voyage to Portland, England where the Captain joined us as we entered the harbor
Here is an excerpt from my book, describing our second probe under the ice
During the evening of June 14, 1958 we saw our first ice. The veterans called it "brash and block" to distinguish it from the solid ice we will be seeing up ahead. We took the boat deeper and checked for leaks in this colder water. As the metal parts contracted with the cold temperature you could get a leak that had not shown up previously and occasionally a prior leak stopped. Everything looked good; the boat was dry so we continued on. The difference between this trip and the previous one is that there was very little room to maneuver in these waters. The bottom was very flat and shallow. The ice is became thicker. It was extending 20 feet below the surface ... and then 30 feet. We did not like the look of it. The Western route was closing much too fast!
All of a sudden, out of the blue, back in the engine room we heard the dreaded sound of the collision alarm. It sounded like the alarm you hear from the sirens on the ambulances in foreign movies:
WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP!
If this was just a drill, the alarm would be followed by the verbal announcement, "This is a drill", but the message didn't come. So it must have been for real. Now what? A microsecond later we got the word, "this is a drill". It seemd that the conning officer thought we were going to hit a big hunk of ice for sure, but at the last second realized it was going to miss us. Since we had not had any of the standard drills lately, he decided to give us the collision drill then. The only problem was he hesitate for a couple of seconds before announcing it was only a drill.
No matter how hard he tried, the Captain cannot get us through on the western side so he made the decision to try the eastern side of Saint Lawrence Island. We reversed course 180 degrees and then proceeded to head up the other side. The Captain brought us to periscope depth to let us ventilate the air inside the hull with the snorkel, and then he turned back North, following along the Alaskan coast.
All was not well on this side either. The water was shallow. There was only 45 feet of water beneath our keel, and now the master compass was giving us trouble for some unexplained reason. The next day the compass failed completely, but the Inertial Navigation system seemed to be working, so we forged ahead. We arrived at the Bearing Straits; the gateway to the Arctic. All we had to do now was cross the Chuckti Sea and it would be clear sailing from then on. We cruised under ice floes of varying sizes and thickness, when all of a sudden the bottom started rising dramatically. The Captain decided to surface and see if we could get over this shallow spot. We ran for about 7 more hours on the surface and then up ahead we saw a solid wall of ice.
"TAKE IT DOWN … AHOOGAH… AHOOGAH … DIVE … DIVE!
As we headed towards the Arctic Sea, the ice thickness began to change rapidly. On the last trip the East Coast ice pack th ice had averaged 10 to 15 feet thick, but now the ice hung 40 feet below the surface. 40 feet turned to 45 and then 50 feet. And now we passed under a hunk of ice that was 63 feet thick. The Captain reduced our speed to dead slow. We cleared that piece by only 25 feet. Big deal, so what? Who cares? After all, we were in a submarine. Depth was our friend not an enemy. That was true most of the time but not now! We cared because it means that surfacing was impossible. If there was another emergency like the fire or amine leak we had earlier... tough luck!
We passed through the Aleutians and headed into the Chuckti Sea when we noticed the bottom coming up rapidly again. We were riding through a huge undersea mountain range. There were no depth or ice thickness charts for that area. We had a blank piece of paper, a sharp pencil and made our own chart as we moved along. There was a mountain in front of us, how tall is it? Will it be so high that as we go over the top our superstructure will contact the bottom of the ice? We were going to find out in a hurry. This mountain was not a smooth mountain. It was full of ridges, peaks and caverns. A little over 9,000 years ago the landmass of Alaska was connected to the landmass of Siberia. We were passing over that old land mass. There were a whole lot of mountains below us.
PING-PING-PING-PING-PING-PING-PING, PING, PING the echoes were getting closer, the space between the ocean floor and the bottom of the ice shown on our sonar screen was closing.
The Captain called for an increase in depth that brought us to within 20 feet of the bottom. If we got too close to the ocean floor the rudder and propellers could be damaged, and debris from the bottom could be sucked up into our sea strainers. The Captain called for a slow turn to the port side as Sonar reported two more massive ice ridges up ahead. We crept under the first one, but as we approached the second ridge the needles on the ice machine crept towards each other. The sail was about to make contact with the bottom of the ice. There were no crash bars welded to the top of Nautilus. That meant the two periscopes and radio antenna could become damaged with even the slightest contact. At best this could leave us blinded or disabled. At worst we were about to become trapped somewhere in an icy canyon below this thick ice. As the clearance between the needles closed we grabbed the closest stanchions and held our breaths. Then the unthinkable happened! All of a sudden the two wiggley lines on the sonar screen touched. The recorder logged a zero clearance as the top part of the sail glided through some freezing slush that was hanging around the bottom of the solid ice.
A moment later we saw the space open again. We had gone over the top of our underwater mountain! We had come so close that the instrumentation was not able to measure the small clearance remaining as 4,000 tons of atomic submarine squeaked through a space between the bottom of the ice and the top of the mountain that measured 100 millimeters, or only four inches. We learned that actual number much later on when our charts were analyzed and carefully measured back in Washington. Think about that for a minute and think about what we were going to have to do in the event we couldn't get through the ice up ahead and had to turn around. Would we be lucky enough to find that 100-millimeter opening again when we turned? Should we have continue on? We were not asked to vote on that one, the Captain decided YES, we would proceed towards the Pole!