FACTS STRANGER THAN FICTION – PART III – HUGE MIRAGES AT SEA

(I started a new series recently on this topic. Many of you would be incredulous but I vouch for their factual correctness. All of these are first hand.)

The first one was titled: ‘Facts Stranger Than Fiction – Part I –  Mister India And His Ship‘. This was about a Seaward Defence Boat undergoing refit and everyone just forgot about it. The second one was titled: ‘Facts Stranger Than Fiction – Part II – All Cats Are Grey In The Dark‘. This was about some of my course-mates mistaking another tanker at anchorage for my ship INS Aditya when they were invited by me on board. Here is the third one. It was about a strange encounter that a ship INS Ganga that I was the commissioning SCO (Signal Communication Officer) of had with the aircraft carrier INS Viraat that I was Ship’s Commander of.

In the introduction to the series, I had brought out how Navy, as a service, is different from the service on land or in the air. It is not just because of the medium in which it operates. Unlike the other two services, naval platforms operate in all three media: the surface, underwater, and in the air. It is much more than that.

Although it doesn’t require great technical expertise to be at sea (you can be on a log that floats), the Navy continues being a quaint service. Some of the curious things that happen at sea often amaze people and they keep asking such questions as: How could they have missed such a huge ship at sea? How did the ship just vanish? Was it a submarine? If I was there, it won’t have happened this way.

The fact is that seas are associated with strange things happening and many of these anecdotes beat common sense and that’s why the title of the series.

To know about the sea, please read: ‘The Lure Of The Sea’.

Navy is a silent service that very few actually understand. Before we go into the third anecdote let me tell you how much people actually understand this quaint service.

I remember when I was undergoing the Army Higher Command Course in 1996-97 and it was being discussed how two-third of India’s energy imports are in the Gulf of Kuchh, within easy reach of the Pakistan Navy and PAF, it was discussed as to why should we have it imported there? Why can’t we transport it “by lorries” etc to safer places? When I mentioned that a lorry carried upto about 20 tons of fuel and that an average VLCC – just one VLCC that is (VLCC – Very Large Crude Carrier) being received at GoK ports was anything between 100000 tonnes to 250000 tonnes, this was the first time that their minds were exposed to something as large as this.

There is, therefore, no shame in admitting that one doesn’t know. Even some of the Navy guys don’t understand the enormity of things of another branch or department.

A ship at sea wanted to exercise with a submarine that she had met by chance encounter. The submarine signaled back, regretting her inability to do so since ‘she was charging her batteries’. At this, the ship signaled to the submarine that she would approach close to her and batteries could be transferred for charging by the ship.

Didn’t understand the joke? Well, a subamarine displaces about 2000 tonnes. Roughly about one-fourth to one-third displacement of the submarine is her propulsion batteries. These are the batteries that the submarine charges whilst on surface or at periscope depth so as to provide her with underwater propulsion. And, the CO of the ship was asking her to transfer them to the ship for charging! A submarine’s battery is not a small, unitary device like a car battery, but a massive collection of huge individual cells gathered in a large compartment in the lower section of the hull. (See picture)

Viraat is a light aircraft carrier (only about 25000 tonnes). Yet she carries with her, in the form of her flight deck only, about 3 acres of Indian sovereignty wherever she goes. And she has done this, until 23 Jul 2016, when she sailed last, 1,094,215 kilometers of passage around the globe (Vikrmaditya is about twice her tonnage and more than 4 acres of flight deck). Viraat is about a quarter of a kilometre long and you add another about 60 metres for Vikramaditya. Anything between 28 to 33 feet of the ships are underwater. Vikramaditya, for example, has 22 decks (equivalent to ‘storeys’ of a building)

However large a ship may be, it can never match the enormity of the sea. Ask a pilot of an aircraft, for example, and he would tell you that at sea, landing on Viraat appears to be like landing on a match box.

In one of the theatre-level exercises, being the Director of Maritime Warfare Centre (MWC), my staff and I were in the Control Centre and also asked to analyse the exercise. One of the ships (my ex ship Ganga) sent a report from sea of not just detecting (on radar) Viraat, but actually sighting (imagine sighting with naked eyes) Viraat at close quarters. The CO asked his ship’s company to come up on the upper decks and they not just saw Viraat but some of them took pictures too. In that exercise Ganga and Viraat were enemies.

We married the tracks in MWC and found that Viraat was actually 180 Nautical Miles away at that time from Ganga. And yet, even in the debrief, Ganga CO insisted that they saw Viraat. The more we told him that he saw a mirage, the less he believed us. It is similar to Indian sages telling us that the whole universe is merely maya (mirage) and we think that the sages have gone bonkers.

This is just one example of illusions we see at sea.

And, these are not seen by commoners only but by hard-core professionals.

P.S. INS Viraat was decommissioned last year. It was sad to let the old lady go. INS Ganga would be decommissioned in end Mar 2018.