Rekindling old Navy friendships!
I don't know why I didn't think of this before! I found the USS Bluefish SSN 675 Facebook page and made contact with a couple old ship mates! I told them about my books and a few have already grabbed one! Can't wait for the reviews.
Now I'm looking through my picture boxes looking for pix from my time as a Nuc Submariner. This is the first one I found. It's my graduating class from Nuclear Power School in Bainbridge Maryland, 1971. That's me second row down from the top and seventh from the left. Those thick navy issue glasses made everyone look like Groucho Marx! I had forgotten about the mustache.
It was a 6 month school with emphasis on Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow for steam generation engine rooms, Nuclear power generation, math, power plant chemistry and radiation health physics. 12 hour days, 5 days a week with enough homework to say it was really a 6 day work week.
I had an instructor, math I think, that would start on the upper left side of the wall to wall chalkboard (yes blackboard with white chalk) writing as he talked. He would move down the board and then back to the top as he walked left to right, writing the whole time. In his left hand he had an eraser. He would erase the left most row as he wrote the right rows. Yep. You either 'got it' or stopped him before he erased because he was not going to repeat it. It forced you to pay attention and ask questions.
Mostly great instructors who motivated and truly cared that we understood the material. Not all, but most.
I can still do some of the chemistry, power plant operations and equations in my head. Of course I was also 19, so my brain was a bit more agile then. ;-) And the systems I learned are obsolete.
I'll share more as I find the pix.
BTW, Jake Jasper in my 'Arlo and Jake' SciFi series is based on yours truly and some of my mates from this time in my life.
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