Plausibly Live! - The Official Podcast Of The Dave Bowman Show

In December of 1981, I reported to Basic Enlisted Submarine School (BESS) in New London, CT. Winter in New England is amazing. That said, the next few months were filled with intense learning of information and practice. Including the Submarine Escape System, as it existed then. The idea here is that if your boat should sink and not be able to surface, there was a way to escape from the boat and to then be rescued. Through the years the system had been perfected, and at one point was it successfully demonstrated to work from as deep as 600 feet. We actually did a practice run (I did it twice) from a simulated 100-foot depth in the Submarine Escape Training Tower, which, like so much of my life, no longer exists. �Ho, ho, ho,� we would say to keep our lungs from exploding as we ascended from the depths wearing the famed �Steinke Hood.� Upon reaching the surface, a Navy diver would meet us and we had to say, �I FEEL FINE!� If we didn�t say exactly that, then all hell would break loose and medical treatments wou