USS SKATE (SSN-578)

There are a number of web sites out there that give general information about the Skate. Just do a web search on the name and you'll find them. Rather than try to recreate one of those sites, I'll concentrate on personal impressions, and the kind of information that doesn't make it to the other sites.

If you run into some terminology that you don't understand, check out my submarine vocabulary list.

The USS Skate was the worlds third nuclear powered naval vessel. It was comissioned in 1957, when the cold war was raging and everyone truly believed that the evil Soviets were about to invade. The Navy wanted nuclear powered submarines, and they wanted them in a hurry. The Skate came out of that environment.

What was different about the Skate, when compared to other boats? To start with, the hull design is based on the Nazi type XXI uboat. Rather than having the four mid-hull mounted torpedo tubes of most nuke designs, it retained the arrangement common to older diesel boats - six tubes in the bow and two tubes aft. It was designed to use the Mk 14 torpedo of WW II vintage, and still had the alcohol tanks in the torpedo room, from which the torpedos could be fueled. By the time I got there, the forward tubes had been upgraded to use Mk 48 torpedoes, though the aft tubes still held Mk 37's. Much of the gear in the boat looked like it was added after the original construction. Things were stuffed into any location available. You would see things like three identical pieces of equipment installed with the first two side by side right where you'd expect to see them, and the third one on the other side of the compartment under the deck plates. If you'd like to see a great article on the Skate, look up the January 1959 issue of National Geographic.

Life on the Skate was very cramped. The boat was designed for a crew of 87, but usually had about 125 on board. I reported aboard in Yokosuka Japan, which was the first port of Westpac 85, also known as The Final Tour. The exploits of the Skate and her crew during that deployment are legendary, and will need to be told at some point (after I've had a chance to look up a few statute of limitations periods and extradition laws).

Skate was not an impressive performer. It was slower than other boats, couldn't go as deep as other boats, and was much noisier than other boats. The Captian found ways to work with those limitations and we did sometimes kick ass in exercises, but if the big NATO vs. Warsaw Pact war ever started up, we would not have lasted long.

I got to the Skate in 1985, when she was 28 years old. At that time all of the Skate class boats were home ported in Pearl Harbor. It was a good thing they were all assigned to the same place, because there were not enough parts available to keep them all going. They could keep two, and sometimes three boats able to operate, but only by pulling parts off of the one staying in port. When we decommissioned the Skate in 1986, she was ready for it.