The Yachats Gazette, Issue 30, February 1 2014

INTERVIEW WITH LESTER HALL

TYG had the privilege of interviewing long-time Yachats resident Lester Hall, on the occasion of his 103rd birthday, along with his daughter, Shari.

TYG: What was it like growing up in Oregon?
Lester: I think it's about as good a state in the union as there is to grow up in. It's got everything -- all kinds of temperatures…. I used to live in eastern Oregon. Lord, it got down to 40 below once! I tell you, I hated that. But here, this is a great place to grow up.  I've always lived in Oregon, all my life. But I've lived all over. You know where Shaniko is? Antelope? Maupin? You know that country?
TYG-Editorial Ass't: We haven't been there. We've seen it on the map. But we're planning some travel.
Lester: I was born [near] Mariel. We lived down on the Rogue River. Not many people. [chuckles]  My Dad had a pack train that carried freight. From West Fork to Mariel, 20 miles -- a pack train of mules.  Six mules. They even moved a piano -- from West Fork to Mariel. My uncle was a piano player, and a fiddle player -- they had dances on Saturday nights. Man, could he ever play! Little guy -- five foot two!

[…] There was nothing there, not even a school. We had to move to Powers to put the kids all in school. Eleven of us. So we did pretty well. They had the post office, and stores and everything. I loved Powers. It was a clean little town. You knew every soul. Everybody was so friendly.

TYG-EA: What caused you to move to this area?
Lester: My brother had a meat market, and he wanted me to come work with him. I'd been working in the sawmill for a year or so. I come to Waldport in '29. I rode out the Depression. Terrible.
TYG-EA: What was that like?
Lester: Oh, boy. Nobody had nothing. I worked for my brother -- I did fine. I did all the buying and the butchering. And when I left him, he had to hire two guys to take my place. [laughs]

Shari: They had Hall's IGA, which is where Clark's was in Waldport, and now it's closed up, off 101.... He quit high school and worked for a couple years. […] Tell him about carrying groceries on the beach, Dad.
Lester: Oh, yeah. I ran a meat route down the coast, every Tuesday and Friday. Beef and pork. By truck. Model T Ford. I had to drive on the beach. Waldport to Yachats. […] I never had any problems. My brother decided to take the meat route -- he turned [the truck] over, out on the beach. Had the waves coming over him. And the old mailman come by, he had those big tires -- and he started to leave, but he heard somebody groan. "Oh! There's somebody under there!" And he got that sudden wave, and he pulled that pickup off, and saved his life.

Shari: Oh, the other thing you did, didn't you deliver across the old railroad trestles, across the bay?
TYG: Oh! I've seen the supports for that bridge! It's not there anymore!
Lester: No, it's gone! I'd drive that all the time. A couple times a week.

TYG: What did you think your future would be like when you first moved here?
Lester: You know what? I worked for my brother, but he made a slave out of me! [laughter] I was talking to the Toledo banker -- "How much longer you going to work for your brother?" "Well, I don't have any money." "You got anything you want?" "Yeah, I'd like to buy [a certain piece of property]." "Tomorrow you'll know that it's for sale." And sure enough, It happened.

TYG-EA: What did you do with it?
Lester: Raised cattle. It paid for itself.

TYG: What was it like living in Yachats when you first moved here?
Lester: Not too many people here. Real friendly. Everybody knew everybody. And they helped everybody. One time they had a big windstorm, and blew the roof off my barn, and I had a bunch of hay. All the neighbors came and hauled it to another barn. Worked around the clock. That's the way it was then, everybody helped everybody.

Shari: They had a wonderful life here in the Yachats River. Grange Hall was active, they had square dances every Saturday night, the old fashioned thing where they played the fiddle, and kids came. I have fond memories of that -- Mom and Dad were great dancers. Polka. And everybody would stop and watch them dance. And Leonard Carson, and Dawsons, and all were young farmers, just like Dad, on this river. Now we've seen how many generations. We had a rodeo right here in Yachats, do you know all about that?
TYG: No!
Shari: Right where Judy Kaufmann's place is….

Lester: I was a deputy sheriff. Five of us. One time there was four kids got lost, so they sent all of us out looking for 'em. And you know, we found them -- in a hollow stump. They'd put up the night in this hollow stump.
TYG-EA: Where were they?
Lester: In the Bayview country. Beaver Creek. Over in that area.

TYG-EA: Do you still tend the farm yourself?
Lester: Oh, yeah. I got John Bachelor -- he's good. He's smart. He can do anything. And he loves it here.
Shari: He [Lester] is still in on decision making. Very much in on decision making. This is the first year he hasn't fed the cows every day. That's a daily thing, early in the morning, and you have to throw bails.
Lester: I can't walk very far. I run out of gas.

[Discussion of the photo by Ken Gagne, taken at Lester's birthday last year]
Lester: Yep, I've still got those cows.
Shari: He fell down right after that, and that cow kicked him in the head! And he said, "Where's my cane?" He wanted to hit the cow in the head! [laughter]
Lester: Well, it happened! That cow hit me in the back and knocked me onto my belly -- only that far from a big cow turd! [more laughter]

Shari: You used to say that whenever you were stressed, you'd go down and walk amongst the cows, and everything's right with the world.
Lester: Oh yeah. I'd drive the pickup down amongst the cattle. Those calves come up and lick on your door. And man, talk about a stress reliever. They were so entertaining.

TYG: What did you like to do when you were a kid?
Lester: I always had saddle horses, as far back as I can remember. I learned to ride when I was only eight. I was a good rider at eight years old. You ever rode a horse?
TYG: Yes, I have! I used to take lessons.
Lester: Is that right? Well, well, well!
Shari: We learned by… learning how to hang on. [chuckles]

TYG-EA: What are some of the things you remember best from when you were ten or eleven?
Lester: I had a lot of brothers. They worked together, they taught me a lot. I could do most anything, when I was eleven years old.

When I was eleven years old I hired out on a hay truck. Had a team of horses, and I did the loading. I'll never forget one time the boss said, "Turn down here." "No," I said, "it'll turn over!" "When did you take over this farm? Turn down here!" I turned down, and over she went. Full load of hay. "I should have listened to that kid!" [general laughter]
Shari: Didn't you have to go out and gather herbs and things, for your grandmother to make medicines? The Indians?
Lester: Oh, yeah. She was a great old gal. She was smart. She made a lot of medicines.
Shari: Here's her picture. [shows black-and-white photograph] There is a plaque to her at the graveyard down there in Agness.

TYG-EA: Is she American Indian?
Shari: Yes. Well, part -- she's not total. She looks total, but she's not. 
Lester: She could weave baskets you could carry water in.
Shari: She has some baskets in the Smithsonian.

TYG-EA: What do you find the most surprising about the changes that you've seen in the world?
Lester: Pretty slow change, you know. You adjust to it. And that's what happens to me. I never get stressed. What the hell -- I think too much about life to get stressed.

TYG-EA: Have you ever traveled outside of Oregon?
Lester: Never.

TYG-EA: Never once?
Lester: Oh, California.
Shari: And Washington. He's been to visit us in Seattle once. He said, "Why should you travel when you've got heaven right here."

TYG: Thank you so much for your time!





INTERVIEW WITH CDR BRENNAN, PART II

In the first part of this interview (Issue 29), The Yachats Gazette was fortunate to be led on a tour of the NOAA research vessel Rainier. Here is the 2nd half, alas much abridged.

CDR Brennan: We have about 55 people on board, and we carry life rafts for more than double that. […] They’re basically the size of a family tent, so you can imagine 25 people huddled in them—it’s not very pleasant.

TYG-Graphic Design: What’s that bike there ? [pointing to a rather rusty-looking older model bicycle]
CDR Brennan: That’s one of our yard bikes. We carry it with us because a lot of times if we go into a port, like up in Alaska or something, we don’t have cars with us. So just to get around town, we have a number of ship’s bikes.

TYG-GD: And what are [those satellite dishes] for?
CDR Brennan: One of those is a [maritime] VSAT and the other is our TV system. The VSAT system is our satellite communications—even when we’re underway, we get full internet access on board the ship, which has been a huge thing. It seems very luxurious as well, but in reality, what we do with this data [from the mapping]… to have the ability to transfer data off and to get fixes to software on board, and to show people the issues we’re having with data, whatever—to have that form of communication is tremendous. It’s a real necessity. Not to say that people don’t use it to do Facebook or something else, but it’s more than that.

[We move up to G Deck, typically called the Flying Bridge. A Deck is at the very bottom of the ship.]
CDR Brennan: Here is where we would typically have what we call our “Big Eyes”—and they’re just a gigantic set of binoculars, […] and it’s for long-range spying. You know, like if we’re looking at birds, or to try and figure out the name of a ship that we see off on the horizon…

TYG: Why not just contact them wirelessly?
CDR Brennan: Well, we can do that, but sometimes you may be calling them, and you may say “Calling the ship in position latitude this, longitude that, in approximate position 30 miles southeast of […] Newport, this is NOAA ship Rainier”… and nothing comes back. Unless you call them by name, they won’t answer you. So sometimes it’s just a helpful way. Now we’ve also got a system called AIS, it’s the Automated Identification System and it has a transponder and it sends the ships’ names out, so that’s very helpful. But a lot of the small fishing boats, like these guys, they don’t all carry it yet.

[F Deck is also where they flash Morse code, and the magnetic compass. We move on down the ladders, so-called because they’re too vertical to be called properly stairs]
CDR Brennan: This is what we call a davit, here. Normally this would hold another launch [boat]. […] You can see that this is a giant pivot here, and this is a pin, so this whole thing pivots up and out and over the water—that 30-foot boat gets lifted out and over and down.

TYG: How do you get into the boat once it’s in the water? Or do you man it first?
CDR Brennan: […] It gets lowered over the side, and then you can see that next deck down there—the crew will be waiting down there and board. […] Then they would man their lines and then it would get lowered into the water. We typically do that underway doing about three knots. That’s probably one of the most dangerous, but also one of the most exciting evolutions that we do, and we do that every day.

TYG: What’s the top speed of these small boats?
CDR Brennan: These boats can do about 25 to 28 knots.

TYG: What’s the top speed of the main boat?   
CDR Brennan: The ship only does 11 knots, lively. […] This one is another of our boats. It’s a skiff, only 18 feet. […] [We see a third kind of boat with a very shallow draft and of very thick metal construction sitting on deck] In order to support the mapping, we have to put tide gauges in [… and] a GPS base station in to measure the GPS atmospheric errors. And so we have to typically go ashore, and some of the places where we go ashore it can be very rocky and we need a shallow-draft vessel [only about a foot of draft] and a rugged vessel. We can actually just run this up onto the beach and not have to worry about the rocks too, too much—we have to tilt the engine up. But basically it’s just like a giant pick-up truck. So we’ll load all the tide gear stuff in the back, and run it onto the beach and set it up. […] Frequently we’ll have five people plus gear in this boat going ashore so it’s usually a heavily weighted boat. Plus the boat itself is very heavy. When you look at a boat this size that you see on trailers, they’re made out of aircraft aluminum that’s measured in millimeters—the aluminum on this is a quarter inch thick. […]

TYG: May we board her?
CDR Brennan: I don’t have a good way for you to get in right now, but if you like I could take you into one of these launches—they’re a little more exciting.

TYG: Oh, yes please! You’re very generous, Sir.
CDR Brennan: This is not on the general tour, I can tell you that!

[We climb up and out onto a metal grate gangway, take care to avoid the tripping hazards that are pointed out to us, and we board the launch that’s hanging mid-air]

TYG: What’s the lower deck of the ship [launch] for, and how do you even get there?
CDR Brennan: These are not very glamorous boats, obviously work boats [opens a hatch that leads below deck into a workroom and a tiny attached toilet room …]. Basically this is where we acquire all of the data—these are the work horses. Frequently what we do is the ship will just anchor in some harbor, and we’ll act as the mother ship. The four launches will go out and survey, and come back at the end of the day.

TYG-GD: Is everybody certified to be a pilot?
CDR Brennan: No. No, they’re not. Keeping people qualified to drive these boats is a full-time job. We have people moving on, or transferring out… These [launches] are fairly unique and they take a lot of skill to drive. Typically, we’re telling them to go into places where most people do not go, because that’s what we’re trying to find: where are all the dangers? So they’re going into the dangerous spots so that they know what’s there, so other people don’t have to. [The pilots] have to be very skilled to go and do that. The boat itself is probably close to a million dollars, and then there’s probably another million dollars or so of electronics on board, when you look at the sonar, and this commercial navigation system; there’s a whole series of accelerometers that help it navigate both with GPS and inertial range. […] This boat would be ready to go with very little preparation. We’d have to get guys on board, they would do a quick engine check before we get underway, and they would do a systems check of all our electronics and load it with drinks and goodies, snacks for the day, and get the crew on board, and you’d be ready to go. That’s typically what we do in the morning: have a safety brief every morning, and talk about what the dangers might be, whether it’s weather or sea conditions or working in shallow water, or something like that.

[We disembark and go back down to D Deck and see another type of launch, and then move on to a rather torpedo-looking object attached to a pole at the side of the ship near the back]

CDR Brennan: Remember that machine in the plot room where I was talking to you about sound velocity? It controls this machine here. See this device here that looks like a torpedo? There’s a sensor in that. And do you remember talking about all the particles in the water? Well ultimately, what the sound velocity relies upon mostly is the temperature and the salinity. Those are the two drivers that drive the sound velocity through the water. So that measures the conductivity, which is directly related to the salinity and the temperature. It also has a pressure sensor on it, because as the pressure increases, so does the sound velocity. So it measures those three things, and we basically tow this behind the ship, kind of like a giant fishing lure. […] Typically a fishing pole has a button on it that you can release that allows the line to pay out. This operates kind of on the same philosophy as that. So basically we troll it back behind the ship, maybe about 100 meters out, then when it comes time to take a cast—this thing is very heavy, it’s solid bronze, and probably weighs about 80 lbs—so you just release the brake on it. It doesn’t just free flow out; the drum here on the winch actually feeds the cable out the back so this is allowed to basically free fall straight to the sea floor. So it will get within about ten percent of the water depth, and then the brake is applied. When the brake is applied, it’ll start to come back up. So the whole time it’s free-falling, it’s recording data: conductivity, temperature, and pressure, which gets converted into depth.

TYG-GD: This isn’t a bungee cord, is it?
CDR Brennan: It looks like a bungee cord, but it’s actually a Kevlar cable with a co-axial conductor that runs through the center. So this stuff on the outer side is just a nylon sheathing that’s abrasion-resistant. So [this machine] is in constant communication with the plot room—we can see it the whole time, and get health updates on it and make sure it’s sending data. For the ship, this is an incredible device, because otherwise, the way that these launches have to do that, they have to stop and lower a device over the side by hand and then bring it in. So if the ship had to do that… it takes anywhere from 20-40 minutes depending on how deep the water is there to do [a cast], so you can imagine that […] you’d lose about 3 or 4 hours a day depending on depth just to do sound velocity casts.

[We continue to explore the ship, getting to see the dive prep room, the steering gear with the rudder attachments, the weight room and hardware storage, the computer servers, and the crew mess hall. We finally get to see the Officers’ mess hall, where we approach the large Arctic map on the wall]
CDR Brennan: […] Alaska is where most of the un-surveyed areas that we have in our inventory [the United States’ inventory] still lie. When you look at the area that we are responsible for, it’s significant; most of that area that remains either un-surveyed or without modern survey techniques lies in Alaska. Either it was covered in ice, or there’s no population, no need; a lot of our survey efforts go to the 40 militarily and economically significant ports throughout the US, most of which are in the south. This ship and the Fairweather have basically surveyed the entire coast between Seward and the Canadian border—45 years just for that, [plus] Prince William sound, Kachemak Bay where Homer is, Cook Inlet. These are all what we would say are the easy areas. Now where we’ve been surveying is out here—the Shumagin Islands—the areas we surveyed this year, there were [previously] no soundings at all.

TYG-GD: I’ve heard of several recent earthquakes in Alaska—where are those? 
CDR Brennan: Oh, a lot of the ones you’ve been seeing are probably from around here on Adak and Dutch [Harbor], but this one had some steaming going on this summer and there were a couple of earthquakes—we were right here, and could see it.

TYG-GD: Oh, so there are a lot of volcanoes?
CDR Brennan: Oh, all the way along. When you sail through here, there’s just volcano, volcano, volcano. There’s Veniaminof, Pavlof [these were volcanoes where they had been surveying].

TYG-GD: So what happens when there’s and earthquake and you’re on the ship? Nothing at all?
CDR Brennan: Well, that depends. If that earthquake causes some sort of a landslide… there’s basically a shelf that runs along here, and if an earthquake caused a large portion of that to slide, it would definitely create a tsunami. And if that tsunami came in and we were near shore, it could definitely be very problematic. And that happened! We came in here at Cape Spencer, started coming down through Chatham Strait, and we got word that an earthquake had happened on Queen Charlotte Island or something, and we headed off shore until we got confirmation that no tsunami had happened.

TYG-GD: How far out do U. S. waters extend?
CDR Brennan: 200 [miles] is our exclusive economic zone, from the seaward-most point. […] There’s a new law out now, put out by the United Nations that says [that] if you can show that there is continental shelf area that extends beyond that 200 nautical miles, your government can lay claim to that area as part of your sovereign territory. So we’ve been doing a lot of surveying up here [in the Arctic Ocean], because the Chukchi Calf [?] extends way beyond into the Arctic Ocean.    […] So we think we can make a claim north into the Arctic Ocean that’s significantly farther than what we currently own. […]       

TYG: Thank you so much, Sir!
CDR Brennan: Certainly!

The Yachats Gazette, Issue 29, January 1, 2014

Interview with Commander Rick Brennan, Chief of the Hydrographic Branch of NOAA

The Yachats Gazette first met Commander Brennan at a talk hosted by the Yachats Arts & Sciences Guild, and in speaking with him afterward, was invited to tour the research vessel Rainier. We met up with CDR Brennan on the pier, then moved inside the ship.

TYG-Graphic Design: It looks like you guys have uniforms on. Are you part of an armed force somehow?
CDR Brennan:  We are part of a uniformed force. So there are seven uniformed services in the United States, five of which are armed forces. So you’ve got the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, and the Coast Guard. Then there are two other ones, which are the lesser-known ones of the uniformed services: [NOAA] is the seventh, and the sixth one is the Public Health Service. So you’ll see, we have a couple of the Public Health Service officers here, and they’re kind of chameleons, because they will go wherever they’re needed. So a lot of times if they sail or work with the Navy or the Coast Guard, they’ll wear whatever the uniform of that service is that they’re serving. They sail on our ships. If we have a ship that’s going to be away from land and be in a place where there is no medical service, they’ll actually sail on board with us in case there was a medical problem.

TYG: [changing subject] Here’s my question: you said there are four aluminum boats usually-- shouldn’t that be RA2 and RA4 then, or is that one [pointing at a rescue boat] RA 1?
CDR Brennan: The odd boats are on the starboard side, and the even boats are on the port side.

TYG: Oh, so you have five boats?
CDR Brennan: Well, we actually have even more than that. So that’s RA 1 which is our fast rescue boat—that’s the orange boat. If somebody were to fall over the side, that we’d deploy that boat. Because it’s, well, fast and easy to deploy.

TYG-GD: Does it tip over to the side?
CDR Brennan: Well, that big white arm that says Vestdavit on it, it’s actually on hydraulics. So it pivots out to the side, and that it lowers the boat all the way down to the water. And then the other two boats, it operates the same way. So that’s 1, 3, 5, and then we’ve got 2, 4, and 6 on the other side, although we don’t have a 2 boat right now. We’re actually getting a new number 2 boat. And then we have 7 and 8, which are skiffs. […] You’ll see them when we come on board. But sometimes when you come up close it’s hard to see that there’s a boat there, because will be up underneath them. I’ll show you the details on those a little bit later.

TYG-GD: I noticed this has a long prow… Bow? Is this boat used as an icebreaker? I know you said you’re going to be up in Alaska.
CDR Brennan: She’s ice-strengthened, but she’s not an icebreaker.

TYG: My guess is that it’s mostly for speed then?
CDR Brennan: That’s just kind of the way the boats were designed. This boat [the Rainier] is actually 45 years old. So this is a very traditionally-designed research vessel.

TYG: She doesn’t look 45!
CDR Brennan: I know! She’s in great shape, and that’s thanks to the crew on board. They do a wonderful job of maintaining her. But this ship [points to the ship tied fore of the Rainier] is one of our newest ships. So you can see that it’s a completely different design style. Much higher. Very blocky. They’re not big into aesthetics these days. [laughter]

TYG: It looks more like an oil platform rather than a research ship!
CDR Brennan: It does. But one of the things is that on this ship, 45 years ago, people were not very interested in creature comforts. We have a number of rooms where we have four people living in one stateroom. It’s very cramped quarters. So we’ve learned over the past 45 years that people kind of like a little privacy, you know? […] So that’s why these ships have gotten bigger—they’ve tried to limit it so that each crew member only has to room with one person instead of three people. So instead of having four-man rooms, they have two-man rooms, which means that the ship has to get much bigger. So would you like to come on board now?

TYG: Yes, Sir! [We walk up the gangway.] I like that this gangway is pretty shallow!

CDR Brennan: So, the first thing that you get to the starboard conning station. Starboard is just the right side of the ship. This is where, if we were coming into the pier like we are right now, we would have this cover removed and I can show you—just take a quick peek here—we have throttles and bow thruster here. We don’t necessarily have the ability to steer the ship from here but usually we’ll just have somebody standing at the steering wheel. Also, here, we have the Gyro repeater, which is basically like a compass, except it’s run on gyroscopic principles as opposed to magnetic.

TYG: I see! So it always points north, no matter what direction it is.
CDR Brennan: And, it’s not susceptible to the magnetic characteristics of the ship. Because as you know, metal always has some latent magnetic properties, and this whole ship is metal. [Moving inward] This is the bridge. This is where we navigate from. So when we’re sailing from point to point, this area is always manned. We have two radars, an X and an S band, which relates the frequency of the radar.

TYG: X being higher, I’m guessing?
CDR Brennan: Yes, it is higher. Higher frequency, meaning…

TYG: Shorter range?
CDR Brennan: Yes, you’re right, shorter range, and it means what about its wavelength?

TYG: It’s going to be less between the peaks. And so you get finer detail.
CDR Brennan: That’s exactly right. And so this one, as you indicated, is very good for close in, say 1 to 6 or 1 to 12 miles. The S band, since it has a longer look wavelength and a lower frequency, can travel much farther. So we use that to see, as we call it, “over the horizon,” out from the 12 to 48 mile range, to see if there are any ships farther away from us that we should be planning on. […] So steering wheel is here. This is what we call our ECDIS system, which is Electronic Chart Display Information System.

TYG: So it’s where a map would be in the old days.
CDR Brennan: We still have paper charts, but this is our electronic one. We actually have a number of them, so we’ll have this one here [ECDIS], and then we’ll display a similar one right here, that we use for kind of instantaneous planning. We use [ECDIS] for navigation as well, but it tends to be kind of our long-term planning, let’s say if were on a track from here to Kodiak. This one over here, we can see if there’s a quick anchorage or something.

TYG: How does someone type on such a small keyboard?
CDR Brennan: We don’t do a whole lot of typing on it. If we have to do a lot of typing, we usually plug in a USB keyboard. And the guy who usually types on it has fingers as big as Italian sausages. [laughter]

TYG: I’m guessing that this equipment isn’t up-to-date?
CDR Brennan: No, this is a fairly modern system. […] A lot of the new ones do have touchscreens, but the problem with this is, that for it to be compliant to be on a maritime vessel, it has to have all sorts of accessibility requirements. When they do that, they call it being type approved. And so to be type approved for a maritime vessel, it has to operate with a certain operating system, and it has to have all sorts of redundancies, like backup power supply, and a backup hard drive.

TYG:  Although that could be very useful! Say you hit an iceberg or something, that could be very useful. [The accident] could take out some of your main power wires, and if you have backup wires, that’s great. You can get the ship out of there, and limp it to a repair station. If you don’t have the backups, you’re stuck there until you can get a crew down there.
CDR Brennan: Absolutely. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take anything near as catastrophic as that, as we found out one time.

One time, we found that the voltage that was being put out by the ship’s generators dipped down just a little bit lower than what our emergency generator was expecting, so the emergency generator kicked on. It started blinking back and forth, and it shut all of this stuff down—all the bridge equipment. It shut the radars down. That’s how we found out that the battery power for this UPS, the uninterruptible power supply, was dead. We were basically navigating out of a small port in Alaska, and we were heading right to land, getting ready to make a 90° turn when all that happened. And that was just a simple little electronic glitch. Luckily we were going very slowly, and maneuvering with caution. We immediately stopped the engines and came to a complete stop until we figured it all out. But that was a brief bit of excitement we had. […] This is the steering wheel here.

TYG: It looks like it turns 45° each way, that’s your maximum radius?
CDR Brennan: Nominally, yes; I think typically it doesn’t go that far. I think 35°—I need to go back and look at our rudder stops.

TYG-GD: It’s interesting that in the old-time ships, the wheels were huuuuuuge, and now you have this little bitty bitty thing—it’s even smaller than a car steering wheel.
CDR Brennan: I’ve seen some in the newer ships, they don’t even have one this big, it’s just a dial. It’s a little offputting to think they are controlling the ship [with this].

TYG: [Changing subject] What’s this?
CDR Brennan: This is the bow thruster. So we want to thrust the bow to starboard, we just push that over, and there’s basically a small diesel engine in the bow of the ship that drives the propeller one way or the other. […] It’s like a giant outboard motor. And these [shows some different thrusters] are propellers on the ship: so this is forward, and this is astern. The interesting thing is that on this ship, the propellers are always spinning. So when we start the engines, the propellers start spinning immediately.

TYG: How do you stop then?
CDR Brennan: Well, we don’t stop. If we want to stop, we have to turn the engines off. But the way we create propulsion, is that the blades of the propeller are like the blades on a jet prop airplane, and they change pitch. They’re called a variable pitch propeller. So if we want to go in reverse, the propellers change pitch to move the water forward, and we go astern.

TYG-GD: So, the person who is steering, is not the person who is speeding. So you have to have two people.
CDR Brennan: When we’re underway, and out of port, and offshore, there will typically be only two or three people here on the bridge. But when we’re leaving port I’m always there.

[Moving over a bit to the spread-out paper map, held down at the corners by 4 flattish leather discs] So this is where we are here.

TYG: Cool paper weights!
CDR Brennan: Yep! These are just beanbags—these are what draftsmen used to use quite a bit, because [they] didn’t mar the paper. Do you know where we are?

TYG: [locates the ship on the map, which is covered in depth readings only in the mid-20’s along the pier] So if you wanted to get underway, you’d full reverse, move the wheel probably full 35° left. You’d come out [from the pier]. Now disengage the engines— put the propellers back to zero—we’re now facing [west]. Then we could simply engage the engines forward and drive out of the bay. Is that how you do it?
CDR Brennan: Well, sort of. The propellers and the rudders are at the back of the ship. So, we’re able to control the back of the ship very well, but the front of the ship doesn’t respond very well until we’re actually moving. […] So, how does a rudder work?

TYG: [explains with many gestures that the rudder works in a direction opposite to that in which you turn the steering wheel.] And it goes through a complicated system of gearing. And I think I know why the old [steering] wheels were so big. [It’s] because there was no electric drive controlling it. Now, probably, it signals an electronic brain to move it to a certain degree.
CDR Brennan: Yep, it’s all hydraulic. So in the old ships, that’s why it was so big. When you see the Coast Guard Cutter Eagle, or any of the big tall ships, the wheels might be 6 or 8 feet in diameter. That’s because it gives you a mechanical advantage. You used to have to turn some chains on a chain drive, and the rudder was as big as a barn door. So you can imagine—to turn that wheel, particularly on the tall ships, they would have to have two people on the wheel: one pulling up on one side, and the other to be pulling down on the other side. And as they got into any kind of seaway, where they had all the sails up, it would be very difficult. But now, everything is run by hydraulics, which are very simple. But there are actually two computers inside that system, one for each of the redundant systems that control the rudder. I’ll show you where those are.

[Coming back to the map and the question of leaving the pier] The rudders don’t work unless we have water flowing over them, because that’s the only way they’re going to create any type of force.

TYG: [proposes engaging the engine in reverse]
CDR Brennan: But if you’ve got it going backwards, where is the water flowing from your propellers?

TYG: The water is flowing forwards.
CDR Brennan: Is any of it going over the rudders then?

TYG: […] No.
CDR Brennan: It’s confusing, isn’t it! […] Here, I have something I can show you—we have these discussions quite a bit. [We go down a deck into the Commander’s office, which is attached to his stateroom.]

Just for these occasions, I have a ship here. [He shows us a magnet shaped like a ship with a schematic of the interior, positioned on his office door, which is metal. He grabs a whiteboard marker.] I think I can erase this… We’re at the pier, and we have our propellers, and our rudders are aft of them. […] We actually turn like wanting to turn into the pier, and then we go forward. Then the prop wash starts running over the rudders, and it pushes the stern out like that. And I’ll tell you another sneaky thing that we do: we have a mooring line that ties the bow to the pier. So that keeps us from going forward at all and allows the stern to come out [the ship swings around out from the pier, with the bow as the stationary point]. Then once the stern is away from the pier, we can take that line in, and we back away. A little counterintuitive, right?

TYG: Thank you for the explanation! […]

CDR Brennan: So this is my office—if you want to, you can go and take a look into my stateroom. That’s where I live. This is the penthouse suite here on the ship. Nobody else has a room this big, for which I feel very lucky.

TYG-GD: Wow, you have a fridge and everything! And fishing poles! And a private bathroom!
CDR Brennan: Having come from the smallest ship in the fleet to this ship, it feels very luxurious.

TYG: The smallest ship in the fleet? How small is the ship?
CDR Brennan: 90 feet. [The Rainier] is 230 feet. I had a bunk bed that I shared with the other guy, and then we shared one bathroom between four people, so that made it lots of fun. It was very tiny. So if somebody had to walk through the room, the other person had to get into their bed!

TYG-GD: [Seeing cards for “Dad” on the wall] So, we wanted to ask you about your family. What happens when you go away? Are they here?
CDR Brennan: Yep, they stay here. My last assignment was on the Fairweather, which is the ship just astern of us here. Technically, her home port is in Ketchikan, Alaska. I was the executive officer on there. While I was on there, my family was in Norfolk, Virginia. That was very difficult, because they were four hours’ difference from us when we were in Alaska. It was very hard to communicate with them, because when I was getting up, they were at work; when I was getting off work, they were going to bed; and so that was really tough. So when I got this assignment, I said: “No, no. We’re not going to do that.” So the family moved out here with me and it’s been wonderful. […] My two years on this ship will be finished this coming June, and so when school gets out, we will pack up and move back to the East Coast again. I’m going to go to Washington, DC, for an assignment there.

TYG-GD: It’s a lot of moving for them! Do they like it out here, though?
CDR Brennan: Yes, they’ve had a really good time. This is the first time any of us have ever lived on the West Coast. I’ve had assignments here, but [it’s the first time] that the family’s been here. We’ve enjoyed it. We did a trip around Oregon this summer, and went to Crater Lake, the lava lands, the Cove Palisades [State Park, in Terrebonne, OR], kind of just toured all around. Every time we get a chance, we go. We went to the Giant Spruce yesterday for a hike [down at Perpetua]. We love that. It’s kind of one of our quick, simple hikes.

TYG: I have a question. Are all the beds this comfy?
CDR Brennan: Pretty standard mattress on all of them. […] It’s better than a hammock, that’s for sure. But I know that I get the best room in the house here. Certainly a lot of guys, who are more senior than I am in age, have to live in fairly tight quarters, so I try to be very respectful of that.

[Moving back into the office] That piece of equipment over there is a 36-inch plotter. So we can make our own charts if we want to, and a lot of times we will print out some data. So if you want, we can go to the plot room, and I’ll show you that, and I’ll show you some of the data.

TYG: Yes, Sir! [We move back up the ladder, into the room directly aft of the bridge.]

CDR Brennan: This is what we call our plot room, and this [gestures at a large sheet of paper on top of the large collection of filing drawers filling most of the center of the room]…

TYG: … Depth measure, I’m guessing?
CDR Brennan: Yes, yes it is, in fact.

TYG:  What’s the scale? 100 feet?
CDR Brennan: Um, chart scale 1:10,000. So the charts are in feet on this one.

TYG: I see. I guess the colors mean something… so let’s see, the deepest part of the Port [of Newport] is about… 40 feet?
CDR Brennan: That’s right.

TYG-GD: What’s the draft of this ship?
CDR Brennan: 17 feet. Here’s the problem—what do you notice right here? [Points at a spot near where the ship is moored, which reads 16 feet.]

TYG-GD: Wait, so are you resting on the bottom?
CDR Brennan: No, we’re actually here right now [at 24 feet]. […] When we came in last year, we pulled in at high tide, and we said: “Wow, it looks really shallow here, I don’t remember it being this shallow!”  [Our] boat had just gone and done a survey. We looked at the data, and said: “Huh! That is not the 25 feet we’re supposed to have here!” So we ended up sliding back, and that’s why this spot along here is vacant right now. They’re actually going to start dredging in January. What ended up happening, is that when they put this whole pier in, the water flows right through here [through the pilings]. So as it flows through, it hits the piles under the pier and that slows it down. All the sediment drops right there. […] So all the stuff in color is the stuff that we surveyed.

TYG: How did you survey this? It’s only 10 feet [on the north side of the breakwater].
CDR Brennan: Oh, with the aluminum boats. That’s why we have those launches, because they can get into these smaller places. Technically this ship has the capability to do it, but we would want to take the ship back [behind the breakwater].

TYG-GD: So what’s the radius of the depth sounding when you’re on the main ship?
CDR Brennan: It’s 150° I think. Different sonars have different spreads on them. At its worst about 90°—45° to either side, but typically we’re filtering out at about 60° I believe. So we get 60° to either side, so about 120°. Most of the systems today do about 150°, but the outer couple of degrees and up getting a little fuzzy. A lot of times we don’t use them because they’re statistically not as good. That’s a fixed swath—the deeper the water, the wider the swath is. As we get shallower and shallower, the amount of work goes up and up and up, because there’s a lot more work to cover a square nautical mile the shallower the water is. So in one pass, we go offshore and we can get almost a kilometer-wide swath if we’re in deep water.

TYG-GD: [Examining a different piece of paper] So this is your ship on all levels?
CDR Brennan: Yes, this is our DC plan, which is Damage Control. Usually, when were under way, once a week we’ll have a drill. We’ll set off a fire alarm, and they’ll say: “Oh, well, it’s on the C deck.” We are currently on D deck. We may say it’s in somebody’s stateroom, and so the people up here will direct the fire teams, telling them where to go, what the fire is, what was reported to be. People go down there with fire hoses and dressed up in full fireman regalia, or turnout gear as we call it, so that they can fight the fire. Because when we’re out at sea, there’s no fireman to call, so we have to fulfill that requirement ourselves. So that’s a weekly evolution we do just to keep people on their toes.
As I was saying, we have a sonar on the ship that can do surveys and that all feeds into that system over there [points to several large black boxes and dead screens on the wall].

TYG: That’s a lot of monitors for one guy!
CDR Brennan: It is!  You were asking about sound velocity casts earlier; this is where we get the readout, but I’ll talk more about that when we get to the fantail.

TYG: The sound velocity also depends on the thickness of the water, the viscosity, and the amount of ambient stuff. Because if there’s a lot of ambient matter in the water, then you aren’t going to have any kind of effective reading.
CDR Brennan: That’s right. Well, you can get an effective reading, but it will be very spatially limited.

TYG: Let’s say you’re going over a plankton cluster, you might not even hit the bottom.
CDR Brennan:  That’s true!  I’d turn these on, but we’ve had some guys doing some work up here. We have these other machines that are used to process the data. If we survey for an hour, all said and done, by the time we do the reports and everything, it’s going to take another four hours to get that [data] out the door. To do a typical survey, it may take us anywhere from 8 to 10 days of surveying and on each of those days we may have multiple vessels surveying—we may have three or four launches working on that one sheet, so it’s a lot. […]

TYG-GD: [Indicating the small disco ball, which has seen better days, hanging from a cord in the center of the room] So, is this your party room? [Note: there are so many file drawers in the center that it’s barely possible to have a small aisle around the room, and this is filled with chairs for each of the computer stations.]
CDR Brennan: [Laughing] We’ve probably had about 400 students right before Christmas come through here, and that’s the one thing they are always intrigued by, this disco ball. That has been quite a source of rivalry between the two ships [the Rainier and the Fairweather]. I forget whether it was started on Rainier, and abducted by Fairweather… The chief steward on the Fairweather used to be a second cook here I believe. She’s pretty fun-loving, and she had gotten [the disco ball]. Point being that whenever the two ships would get together, there would be these stealth teams that would sneak over and kidnap the ball and hold it ransom. We’re currently the keeper of the ball. So it hangs there in honor of that little bit of rivalry. When I was on the Fairweather, we had a team of divers that snuck into the water and swam up under the Rainier and scratched a message into the slime on the hull. It wasn’t until they got pulled out that they saw this.

TYG: What was the message?
CDR Brennan: [Laughter] I don’t even remember. It was some derogatory remark about the people on the Rainier. All in good humor. [We move outside] 

 Part 2 of the interview with Commander Brennan will be featured in the next issue of The Yachats Gazette. We wish you all a prosperous, beautiful, and splendorous New Year!