| The
Thresher and My Last Day at Sea by Paul Hartridge, former Royal Australian Navy |
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My last day at sea was onboard HMAS OTAMA,
returning from a 3-4 month deployment. We had picked up around a dozen civilian
engineers for pre docking trials.
We had dived on this day, and we were closed up at Diving Stations whilst certain tests were being conducted. One of my department, for some reason, started talking about the THRESHER sinking. He said something wrong and so I jumped in and said what I knew about it. When I got to the part of..' and there was around 12 civilian engineers onboard that also died'...it hit me as to what was going on our boat at the time. I looked up and there was 4 of the engineers listening to the story. Gulp! I kid you not, 30 seconds later the dreaded pipe was made over main broadcast...."Flood, flood, flood, flooding in the Engine Room"!! Well needless to say we carried out all the EOP's and obviously we made it, but what a terrible coincidence. It certainly unsettled the civilian engineers who I attempted to calm down by being blasé about it all. But it certainly unsettled me being my last day at sea in the RAN. 01-12-1998 |
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