LexicalForge

The longest I was submerged on single extended operation was 102 days. I am not a claustrophobic person by nature, so I never felt a sense of panic during normal submarine operations. There is a certain measure of comfort taken in joining a submarine that has an operating history. Sea trials on a brand new sub would be different story, something I never did. Honestly, the greatest challenge for long missions is the depletion of food stores. Why? Because the quality of the food was one of the main drivers of quality of life and hence crew morale. Perishable items like vegetables are depleted quickly. Then the staples begin to get depleted like eggs, cheese, meats, etc. By the end of 102 days it was slim pickings and folks were getting pretty grumpy

Did you serve on a "target"?

We did have one "freak out" during one of my deployments. It was a new guy, enlisted RT, who simply did not understand what he was getting into. Maybe he was hard recruited for the nuclear pipeline because he had high technical ratings. While we were diving, he tried to undog and open the lower access hatch to the sail. We were about at 150' deep and the OOD would been on the bridge (sail conning tower) was still standing in the passage in his harness talking to someone. He grabbed the kid along with the Chief of the Boat. There is a two hatch system for access points for redundancy, so even if he had managed to open the lower hatch, we would have been okay. But it created quite the drama. Obviously, his decision was driven by panic because "where did he think he was going to go at 150' down and diving?"

Hmmm, there's not a whole lot the Navy can do eliminate cabin fever other than the occasional "swim call" which is when the boat surfaces in transit and let's guys out to swim in the middle of the ocean. We did that at a really cool place in the Pacific, the CO set the course so we would cross the international date line and the equator where they intersected. It was really cool because we had a party called a "shell back" ceremony and a sea turtle (shell back) surfaced and swam past us in the middle of it. The whole crew was freaking out because it was like a divine sign of good luck

The thing you have to remember about submarine life is that the humans are really the secondary consideration to the Engineers. The humans are there to serve the machine, and this is a strange paradigm I like to think about often as a writer. All of the human space are sort of nested inconveniently among the machines, and the people are crawling around inside the sub like ants inside a whale.