[Seascamp]

Sure, I recall sub commo and the hedgehogs. We didn?t have hedgehogs but some of the older Destroyers in the task force did. To me, the hedgehogs looked like a garden of mutant baseball bats when they were all racked up and good to go. My deal was Operations and dealing mostly with anti aircraft systems and electronic counter measures/spook stuff so the ASW stuff was just part of the environment. I was usually on upper air bank and the sonar consoles were just below mine. So I had a ring side seat and could enjoy their antics when I was clear of green squiggles and any real or perceived bogies.

One ship I was on had the AN/SQS 26A sonar and the keel sonar transmit dome was half the length of the hull and was truly the preeminent super, mega, boom box, zow. It was actually painful to be on deck when that bad boy was pinging.

During the VN War we?d catch a Soviet bear boat snooping around from time-to-time, get over them and give them a rousing ?Razverdonia Comrade? with the 26. Talk about pinging their hull, yikes. But they weren?t hard to find in those days as they sounded like a bunch of marbles rolling around in a s**t can. The joke was that we didn?t even need active or passive to find them, just trail a Geiger counter and bingo, reel them in.

Scamp