Andy Dinsdale – Role and responsibility of being Periscope Watchkeeper
As a Periscope Watchkeeper you are the eyes of the submarine. If you see something that you didn’t know was there, you’ve got to take the right actions and you could do that really quickly.
Simon: That’s a heck of a responsibility.
It is, and you’ve got to realise that you’re the one person on that submarine for that 10, 15, 20 minutes, half an hour, or for however long you’re onboard, you’re the only person that’s looking out. If, and the kind of thing you learn as a Periscope Watchkeeper, is what do you do if you see something that you weren’t expecting, and how quickly do you have to operate and what are your emergency actions to make sure that that ship that comes out of the fog that you didn’t realise was there, you hadn’t picked up on sonar, and all of a sudden is there now, what are you going to do? And it’s only you’ve that seen it, and you’ve got to take the right actions.
Simon: Do you ever say to somebody, “Am I seeing this right?”
You won’t have time. Well, typically you won’t have time, you’ve just got to go with … there will be times when it’s not always like that, there will be times when you’ll see something and it’s not an urgent decision need making, so you’ll see something in the distance, and again going back to the Rule of the Road and you know understanding what a green light is, and a white light and a red light means. You’ll look at something in the distance an you think, “Well that looks like a fishing vessel” because you learn as a Periscope Watchkeeper you have to understand what does a fishing vessel look like at night.
Simon: So it’s the sort of shadow profile is it?
Well it’s the light. Well at night it’s the light, or it’s the profile, does that look like a fishing vessel? And you say, “Officer of the Watch, I think I’ve got a fishing vessel there” and sometimes you will draw on experience.