Reporter's Notebook

Detour

ABOARD THE FREEDOM – Nothing on a ship’s maiden voyage goes exactly as planned. After our fish-terrorizing run up Lake Michigan yesterday, and our transit through the Straits of Mackinaw, the Freedom came to a stop and launched a small boat to pick up a part it missed in Milwaukee. The ship had just set down its rigid-hulled inflatable boat, or RHIB, when I hit my rack last night. I was too worn out to stay on the bridge and watch the boat come back, but I knew it came back because I was jolted out of my blankets by the launch and recovery klaxon.

 The crews of the Navy’s first Littoral Combat Ship line the rails of the new USS Freedom as the ship is commissioned at Milwaukee.

 After a sleepless night of strange ship noises and the clanking of out-of-sight machinery, I woke up to learn the part we’d brought aboard – something to do with our Inmarsat satellite antenna – didn’t work. What’s more, the ship had used up much more of its fuel than expected during our full-CODAG run. What’s more than that, a valve on the port diesel engine was cracked; the Freedom could still run both its diesels, but the engineers recommended babying the port engine until we could get a replacement valve. When I walked onto the bridge this morning, the crew had tricked the ship’s engine-control network into letting us make about 14 knots on our starboard diesel.

But the  hiccups were just getting started. After another stroll through the multi-mission area with the XO, Cmdr. Kris Doyle, a voice came over the 1MC announcing that three of the ship’s generators were offline. A lube oil leak meant the ship could only run one of its four diesel motors that deliver the “hotel load” powering our lights, the sensors, the networks, everything. The Freedom secured electricity in all “non-essential spaces,” meaning we’re using flashlights in our cabins and there were no soft drinks for lunch today in the mess. The continuous-loop showing of “The Bourne Ultimatum” in the crew’s mess was switched off.

Rob and I were talking with Chief Boatswain’s Mate Trevor Davis in the waterborne mission area – the stern section where the Freedom will launch and recover its unmanned watercraft – when the skipper, Cmdr. Don Gabrielson, walked down the ladder. Our itinerary was changing, he said. We would dock at Port Huron, Mich., just inside the northern mouth of the Saint Claire River, to pick up parts and refuel. This would add about a 12-hour delay to our trip.

Immediately, sailors all over the Freedom got on cell phones to make the arrangements for our unscheduled pit stop. Tugs needed to be organized; pier handlers were needed to meet the ship; a shore crane was needed to place the Freedom’s brow. And the Freedom’s navigation staff had to draw a plan from scratch to moor this 3,000-ton warship to a rock-wall dock against a downstream current of 3 knots. When Gabrielson briefed his bridge crew, he told them he wanted it to look like they had planned the stop in Port Huron all along.

As the day waned, they made it happen. All that was left was to pilot the ship through the narrow channel from Lake Huron into the Saint Claire River, under the bridge between Port Huron and Sarnia, Ontario, which, if memory serves, is the kissing capital of the world.

Working closely with the ship’s Great Lakes navigation consultant, Dan Hobbs, and the Freedom’s navigator, Lt. j.g. Shaina Hayden, Gabrielson himself took the ship’s helm. Land appeared along either side of us, then narrowed with each forward mile. Red and green buoys appeared, marking either side of the channel into the river, one not wide enough to permit two large ships to pass in either direction. The Freedom would have to ask a huge Great Lakes bulk carrier, the Canadian Enterprise, to cool out south of Port Huron so we could pass under the bridge and tie up.

Gabrielson and his bridge team lined up the Freedom towards a set of navigation lights on the Canadian shore that appear right on top of each other, but which are really hundreds of feet apart. When the top light shows just inches above the bottom light, a ship knows it’s true in the middle of the channel. If a pilot perceives some distance between them, he knows he needs to correct his course, as with the Fresnel lens pilots use to land on a carrier. The Freedom tracked through the buoys towards the lights before turning gently right under the bridge to Sarniac. The ship’s horn blew three times.

I stood on the starboard bridge wing looking out at Port Huron, a city that scrambles up to the very edge of the waterway with sheds and homes build out on poles over the river. It was another cold, iron-gray day on the Great Lakes. On the other side of the ship lay the chemical plants or refineries of Sarnia, where a few big lake merchant vessels were docked, loading or unloading.

Our tug appeared. Hobbs and Gabrielson radioed to ask its master to stand off in the center of the river, from which it could push us onto the pier, if needed. But under its own power, with an ailing port diesel engine, the Freedom wheeled crisply around from south to north, pointing into the current flowing from Lake Huron. Gabrielson had turned the ship upriver of its dock, and making only steerage with our diesels, we drifted lazily downriver for a few hundred feet. Then, aligned by the current, the ship’s thrusters angled right and pushed us gently against the dock.

The Canadian Enterprise, which materialized as a 730-foot brown bulker with an old-style forward pilothouse, passed us on its way up to Lake Huron. Hobbs thanked the ship for cooperating with our transit.

Port Huronites are evidently avid ship-watchers, and apparently word had spread about the odd-looking boat coming down the river. A crowd had formed in the parking lot near the pier where we tied up. A truck-mounted crane was pulling through the barricades. Policemen were setting up a cordon around the dock.  Gabrielson added a touch of rightward power and the Freedom nuzzled its bumpers up to the riverside dock.

“We’ve never had to use a tug yet,” the captain smiled.

Now the Freedom could plug into shore water and we could use the shiny sinks and heads in the cabins – theoretically. Now the ship could plug into shore power and restore the lights in the passageways. We could pick up the parts for the engine room and the satellite antenna. We could top off the fuel tanks.

It’s been several hours after we docked and none of those lifestyle improvements has come through yet. But when we were eating dinner a few minutes ago – cold sandwiches and salad with pudding for dessert – the lights in the crew’s mess whirred to life, and everybody cheered.