Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [33]
Naturally, today the Enterprise would have held GPS and/or sonar to warn her of shoal water. But in 1985 the GPS satellite array was not yet operational, and carriers were not typically equipped with sonar. Navigation was conduced with LORAN and charts. “I doubt if anyone ever thought of sonar as a grounding prevention system,” Leuschner said. “That task was rightfully left to the COs [commanding officers like himself] and the navigators.”
By 5:30 P.M. , the Enterprise was ominously paralleling the outer edge of the Bank in the autumn dark. Leuschner noted white floodlights about four nautical miles off her bow. He correctly presumed it a gathering of fishing boats, but incorrectly reasoned that a dimmer, flashing red light was one boat’s net buoy marker. Leuschner tried to hail the fishermen to inform them of his position, but received no response. A new navigator, meantime, had only recently begun his shift and began anxiously trying to single out the radar signature of the CB1 (Cortes Bank) buoy on Bishop Rock amid the cluster of boats. On deck, a plane attempting to land missed the deck arresting hook and was forced to make a nerve-wracking second pass.
Disaster might still have been avoided had an alarming call not come in to the bridge at 5:35 P.M. A senior officer belowdecks reported that a man was walking around with a 9mm Uzi submachine gun, and for a critical twelve minutes he kept the junior operator on duty (OOD) on the phone trying to sort out the security issue. “This might have been appropriate on a small ship where the OOD is the action officer on all abnormal events, but not a five-thousand-population carrier,” said Leuschner.
Leuschner was consumed with airplanes, fishing boats, and a series of other decisions. A further underling, who knew the ship’s location, might have warned the OOD to get the hell off the phone, but he was simply too scared to do so. Finally, Leuschner decided to look at the bottom contours that had apparently lured the small scrum of fishermen. When the navigator told Leuschner he would “like to give the Bishop Rock a wider berth than a thousand yards,” the captain was stunned.
It was too late to turn the hulking machine hard left into deeper water, and Leuschner immediately ordered the Enterprise turned hard to the right, to a near due-northerly course, knowing she was likely already in water less than a hundred feet deep. He figured they were still a mile off the buoy, but when the ship reached a sharper angle to the Bishop Rock buoy light, he realized how close they really were. Moments later the immense aircraft carrier vibrated like a car passing over a series of washboard bumps.
The Enterprise struck the Bishop Rock a glancing bow, passing through a saddle-back formation and tearing a sixty-foot gash in her port hull. She began taking on water rapidly and was soon heeled over in an eleven-degree list. Leuschner ordered her counter-flooded to starboard to bring her off the list, while damage assessments were taken belowdecks. The next day, a contingent of marines leaned over the flight deck with machine guns, ready to blast any sharks that might threaten divers inspecting the hull. The divers found the gash, a ripped-off port keel, and severely deformed outboard port propeller blades. The tear would introduce jet fuel into the ship’s drinking water supply, but the inner hull was miraculously unbreached. Despite $17 million in damages, the Enterprise was, remarkably, able to continue her exercise.
The USS Enterprise in 1966. Photo: U.S. Navy.
The Uzi would turn out to be a convincing fake, maybe even a water gun, and ultimately, it was perhaps the final of many contributing factors to what was an extremely unusual grounding of an aircraft carrier in any type of water, much less the open ocean. Indeed, the only other time the Enterprise ever touched bottom was a year earlier in San Francisco Harbor, when she scraped