Date:
To: Distribution List
NEWS-01: What's happening with Silversides?
NEWS-02: Batfish needs our help
NEWS-03: Touring Growler - a missile boat
NEWS-04: SubVet Computer School: Misc Tips and going Green
NEWS-05: Taking a trip. Here is a map to all submarine memorials.
NEWS-06: USS Drum Museum Boat Progress Report
NEWS-07: Another special computer tip
NEWS-08: Museum Subs and maintenence requirements
NEWS-09: Sub Sunk!
NEWS-10: Life below the waves ~~ History of submarines at St Marys
museum
NEWS-11: USSVI Eastern District #3 meeting Recap
NEWS-12: Touring USS Torsk
NEWS-13: What's happening with Cavalla at Seawolf Park???
VET-01: Free Audio Books/movies/music for
Retirees/Reserve/Active-duty
VET-02: Jobs for Vets
CHARITABLE-??: no Charitable news this time .....
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NEWS-01: What's happening with Silversides?
Submitted by: Pat Householder on
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The USS Siversides, (SS 236) conducted 14 war patrols
from April, 1942 to July, 1945 in the south Pacific and
The Silversides is now a museum sub with the Great
Lakes Naval Memorial and Museum in
According to Paul Kidd (Escolar Base), the only
bright spot on Silversides' horizion re: haulout is the high-tech divers inspection completed
recently which revealed no serious problems underwater.
Paul's best guess is it will be two or three more years, at least (before she willl be hauled out.) Meantime
need to continue to raise what we can (earmarked strictly for Silversides)
toward our project. (Contact Paul for info on how to
help at cob-ss424@comcast.net)
Click on the link to see the progress being made on the build-out of the
museum.
http://web.mac.com/sdemosmd/iWeb/GLNMM%20Building%20Project/Photos.html
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NEWS-02: Batfish needs our help
Submitted by: Pat Householder on
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Batfish is looking to raise $60,000 for external upgrades/maintenance.
She is well overdue for a paint job, the deck is rotted out, and they'd like to
get her deck gun remounted, among other things.
Lots of internal fixes to be done, as well, but the exterior is the museums
priority, at this point.
In February 1972, Batfish was transferred to the Oklahoma Maritime Advisory
Board and towed up the
The park is open from March through October.
USS Batfish (SS-310)
Muskogee War Memorial Park
3500 Batfish Road
P.O. Box 253
Muskogee, OK 74402
(918) 682-6294
E-mail: ussbatfish@sbcglobal.net
http://www.batfish.org/
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NEWS-03: Touring Growler - a missile boat
Submitted by: Pat Householder on 4/11/2008
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The USS Growler offers Museum visitors a firsthand look at life aboard a
missile submarine and a close-up inspection of the once "top-secret"
missile command center. Access is available to the various compartments as they
were used during operations.
Constructed in 1958 and on active duty for only six years, the USS Growler
remains remarkable shape. Growler carried and launched
the 56 foot long Regulus missile.
Click on the link for a photo tour of the only
http://www.wa3key.com/grfiles.html
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NEWS-04:
Submitted by: Ronald L Martini on
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a. To restore a file or folder you may have acidentally deleted:
...1. Double click on the "Recycle Bin" on
your desktop.
...2. Right click on the file or files you need and
click "Restore".
This works only if you haven't emptied the Recycle Bin or defragmented
your hard drive.
-----
b. Do I need to defragment
my hard drive? What does that mean? When
you delete anything, it leaves a small space on the hard drive platters (think
of them as a CD). Then when to add a new program or
save some file it is written in the first available space. If
the file is too big to fit in that space, it leaves some and moves to the next
hole/space. If it's a large file or program you are
installing for saving, it will be all over the hard drive discs and slow down
your operation. Defragmenting
puts everything back together. If your machine seems
to be slower that it was try defragmenting:
...1. Start-Accessories-System Tools-Disk Cleanup is
the first step. It empties Recycle Bin, deletes temp. files. then,
...2. Start-Accessories-System Tools-Disk Defragment
...3. This might take some time. Let
it alone
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c. 5 GREEN TIPS
...1. Print tips. Use paper a
second time (flip side) for unimportant "stuff." Save
ink by using your printers "Draft" mode rather than "
...2. Power tips. Via your
computer's Control Panel, check your machines 'Power' settings. Set your computer to hibernate after 30 minutes of unuse. Turn it off at nights. Turn the monitor off after 10 minutes of unuse.
...3. Use those flourescent
lights in your computer area/room. Turn off unused
equipment. If switches are hard to get to, use a power
strip for printers, back up external hard drives and CD burners
...4. CD/DVD waste. How many
times have you put something on a CD. These things hold
600-700Meg, yet most of use have 100-200 on them. Use R/W disks. A little more
expensive but they are reuseable. Also
watch for sales of thumb drives. These are small thumb
size devices that plug into a USB port and carry from 1-8Gig
of info and are rewritable. The act just like a small
hard drive on your system.
...5. Recycle responsibly. Give
that old system to a school/church. Strip off
everything except the operating system, then defragment
before giving it away.
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NEWS-05: Taking a trip. Here is a map to all submarine
memorials.
Submitted by: Ronald L Martini on
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Go to USSVI.org
Click on the 6th button on the left
A map appears--let us assume you are in
Click on
Click on the small "VIEW" button in the 2nd memorial shown, the one
in
Scroll down until you see Google on the right and
click on: "click for map to memorial"
Bingo! A map appears. On the
maps left side you see a scale. By clicking on the +
or - signs you can zoom in or out. Need to move the
entire area up-down-left or right. Those arrows are
above the slider below it.
Bill Lee is in the process of adding longitude and latitude so you can input that
into your GPS device if needed.
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NEWS-06: USS Drum Museum Boat Progress Report
Submitted by: Tom Bowser on
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"We had our Navy inspection yesterday and only had one item, an outlet box
that had been put in 20 years ago was mounted wrong, otherwise they were
extremely pleased with the way the boat looks and our plans and progress for
the hull.
We got our air compressor Friday, we had to purchase it using money donated to
us from the Alabama WWII subvets with their
permission. It is a rotory
screw 15 HP 50cfm made by Quincy Compressor nearby so
service is readily available. The commissioner got us
about 60% discount on it. We will put it on the boat
in about two weeks and get it hocked up and in service.
The movie will start filming on the night of the 26th of this month and they
will film thru the 4th of May. That is why we won't do
the compressor yet. The script has been rewritten many
times, I think we are on revision 15 now and a lot has been added and I feel it
is going to be a good movie, everyone involved is wanting to do this as
realistic as possible but I am sure some of you will find something to pick
apart, Have fun. I may even stick things in weird
places just to see who spots them and who watches the movie so keep your eyes
open.
After the movie I will start repairing the stern for about 6 weeks and then
will have to stop to get ready for the crew reunion and filming of the documentry, so in two months time I will go from being a
POW to a welder/shipfitter/to historian, it is going
to be tough to remember which hat to wear.
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NEWS-07: Another special computer tip
Submitted by: Ronald L Martini on
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Sending and receiving pictures can be a daunting and time consuming experience. We need tools to fix this.
-----
A. Well Picture Manager may be the answer to some of
our download problems. Picture Manager has the ability
to crop, resize, and convert images between various formats like Paint, but
with comparably better picture quality, due to being able to select compression
levels. Picture Manager is a software program included
with Microsoft Office suite starting with version 2003. It
is a basic image editing and image management program. It
replaced Microsoft Photo Editor, which had been included up to Office XP since
Office 97.
Picture Manager also sports several more advanced capabilities, such as batch
editing/saving/renaming, fine-tuning of mid-tones, highlights, and shadows, and
red-eye removal. It also has easy-to-use features such
as one-click image compression, and resizing to a user's own choice. It is also possible to easily export photos from the
program to other Office programs, while allowing a user to specify custom image
dimensions. It does not however, offer any sort of
actual drawing or text-editing tools.
First there are two sizes we are concerned with: 1) is typical height and
width, usually measured in pixels, but can be inches or even metric; 2) is size
in bytes, kilobytes (KB) or even megabytes (MB). The
first one is the dimension of your pictures, while the other is the weight of
your picture. While dimension is not much of a factor,
the weight is because the more pixels (KB or MB) the bigger the file you will
have to transfer. Select your picture, right click,
and select open with and Picture should be one of your choices. Submitted by John Theotonio
B. IrfanView is another program for graphic
manipulation. It is available free from Download.com.
It permits one to resize by pixels/metric/inches and has many special filters
for special effects creation such as embossing, rain drop, sharpen, lightness
control, contrast control, red-eye reduction, rotate, flip, grey scale, blur, despeckle and on and on. If you
download the program, then download the plugins for
it also which contain more fun stuff.
It permits saving the final file in 21 formats including bmp, gif, tiff, jpg
which are the more common. Saving in .jpg in
"SAVE AS" permits you to increase the quality of the final image from
0-100 scale. I usually run 80 but one should play with
sending an image to someone else in different quality. Quality
and to a lesser extent physical size will determine how long it takes to upload
and then to download on the other end.
Want to add text to a photo, such as names or dates? Not
a problem with Irfanview.
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NEWS-08: Museum Subs and maintenence requirements
Submitted by: Pat Householder on
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Almost all subvets are very interested in knowing
that our museum submarines are being properly maintained.
Applicants for a ship donation must be a nonprofit museum organization or a
federal, State or local government entity. Once a ship
is donated at no cost to the government, title and ownership of the vessel is
transferred to the donee.
However, All naval ship museums are required by law to be maintained in a
condition satisfactory to the Secretary of the Navy and can be 'reposessed' by the USN if, in their judgement,
it is not being maintained in a condition that reflects credit upon the US Navy.
The Navy reviews the boats for completeness, technical and safety concerns,
trends in preservation and material condition.
First and foremost, the condition of the hull is very important, but there is
no legal requirement for drydocking.
After all, no one wants to see one of these treasures sink alongside the pier. On the other hand, it is not necessary to maintain the
same sort of drydocking schedule a
active service submarine would go through.
Of the museum boats in salt water, to my knowledge the Bowfin and Pampanito have by far the best record of drydocking haulouts.
Batfish sits in on dry land, Drum has been placed in a cradle ashore, Growler
has not been hauled out as far as I know, and Lionfish was drydocked
1998-9, Clamagore rather badly needs to be hauled out
for overhaul, Nautilus is in good shape, having gone through a shipyard
overhaul several years ago, Becuna needs to be hauled
out and Torsk's last drydocking
was in 1997.
Of the 'Fresh Water" boats, haulout is much less
a concern due to the lack of salt water corrosion. Materially,
Cod is in very good shape, Cobia and Blueback have both been hauled out,
Silversides needs drydocking after 60 years in the
water, Croaker hasn't been hauled out, Requin's
situation is unknown, and Marlin is on land. Razorback
is a special case, not being owned by the navy, but will need a haulout in a few years. Ling sits
in a mostly freshwater environment and has never been hauled out.
Ever wonder what sort of things the NAVSEA rep does
when they do an inspection? Attached is the 'executive
summary' of the last ex-Pampanito inspection report.
Click on the link...
http://www.ussvi.org/Documents/Online__PampDocReport.pdf
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NEWS-09: Sub Sunk!
Submitted by: Ken Johnson on
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For those interested in following the progress of salvage operations on the
Russian Juliett sub in
I spend most of today in
The "main event" is scheduled to start the first week in June and
undoubtedly there will be media coverage and more info released at that time. I know a few of the details as to how they plan to
proceed, but really cannot disclose them in this forum at this time. I expect there will also be publicly released technical
papers on the subject eventually.
See link below...
http://www.juliett484.org/juliett/index.html
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NEWS-10: Life below the waves ~~ History of submarines at St Marys museum
Submitted by: Pat Householder on
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The St. Marys Submarine Museum in
The museum has a large collection of submarine memorabilia, from both the U.S.
Navy and private collectors.
"The Navy items we have on loan to us are a Type 8 periscope, a ship
control panel, a ballast control panel, a watertight door and several other
items from a decommissioned submarine," Crouse said. "From
individuals we have hundreds of photos, models and
miscellaneous artifacts."
The museum also has a library full of primary source documents from submarine
crews.
"We have probably the largest collection of paper copies of World War II
patrol reports in the country," Crouse said. "We
have near 1,700 reports."
Click on the link for the full story...
http://www.fbnewsleader.com/articles/2008/04/24/news/08newssubmuseum.txt
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NEWS-11: USSVI Eastern District #3 meeting Recap
Submitted by: Chuck Jensen on 4/26/2008
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Although the turnout of NC Subvets (Combined SVWWII-USSVI) was not as great as past years, we still had
a good representation of our members especially for the USSVI District #3
meeting.
Dick Kanning will again serve another term as our USSVI Eastern District #3
Commander as
he was unanimously re-elected at the meeting.
Several awards were presented including one to Don Small in recognition of his
years of
service as the USSV-WWII NC State Commander.
Thank you for the leadership Don Small showed during his tenure as our SVWWII State Commander.
Two significant events that occurred under his
watch; one was the dedication of our two state memorials to perpetuate the
memory of the 52
Lost Boats and the S-28 for years to come.
Dick Kanning presented two 2008 Eastern District #3 Commander Awards. Jim Myers received this year’s
individual award for his dedication
as the Tarheel Base COB, being the editor and
publisher of our quarterly newsletter the
ALL CLEAR, and all his work related to our Mk-14 torpedo float.
This year’s base award went to the Hampton Roads
Base for their active participation in the Tidewater area.
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NEWS-12: Touring USS Torsk
Submitted by: Pat Householder on
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Commissioned on
Decommissioned on
TORSK arrived in
Click on the link for a tour...
http://www.baltomaritimemuseum.org/about_gallery.php?gid=1
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NEWS-13: What's happening with Cavalla at
Submitted by: John McMichaels, CAVALLA COB on
4/27/2008
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Moving right along with some very major improvements that are planned here at Seawolf Park, we have decided that we need an advisory
board to help us raise money, cut a lot of red tape, etc, so we have the
nucleus of an advisry board and we had our first
meeting yesterday. We are currently looking for two
more members for this advisory board, but we do have an impressive start.
Admiral Bruce DeMars (Submarines)
Admiral John Butler (Submarines)
Captain Winchester (Airdale)
Judge Grey Miller (Federal Circuit court judge, Houston)
As an "Oh, BTW" the memorial ceremony part of the Cavalla reunion was
rained out, but they had an exellent program at the
hotel.
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VET-01: Free Audio Books/movies/music for Retirees/Reserve/Active-duty
Submitted by: Ronald L Martini on 4/22/2008
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Active-duty, retired, reserve members of the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast
Guard have access to free audio books, movies, and music now available through
the Navy's Audio Books program. To access the Audio
Books program, eligible members must log into www.nko.navy.mil. An NKO user account must be
established to check out materials.
Currently, the online library houses over 8,000 audio books, 400 eBooks, 600 videos, and 1,400 albums. Educational
materials such as foreign language books and manuals, and books on the Chief of
Naval Operation's (CNO's) Navy Professional Reading
list are also available for download.
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VET-02: Jobs for Vets
Submitted by: Ronald L Martini on 4/22/2008
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The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) created a Veterans Employment
Coordination Service to oversee the Department's program to recruit new
veterans into the VA workforce -- especially recently disabled combat veterans. The new office will work with military transition
programs, veterans' service organizations and other VA programs to promote
careers in the VA work force. The program will also
work with VA managers and human resource offices to ensure supervisors area
ware of programs for hiring veterans. In November
2007, VA announced plans to hire 10 full-time regional veteran employment
coordinators who provide hands-on assistance to former servicemembers
interested in careers at the VA. The new office will
oversee the regional coordinators.
While this service is not yet quite ready for prime time, watch at: http://www.va.gov/
In the meantime try the link URL below
http://www.military.com/Careers/Home/0,13373,,00.htm