The Trials of Seaman Kelly

Everything in the following story is true except the name of Seaman Kelly. So there I was, 400 ft under the surface of the ocean on a boat that was designed to sink. It was early in the cruise, and we had a good 40 days before we had any hope to see in sunlight again. Luckily, there are only seven days on any submarine cruise. There’s the first three days, the last three days, and Groundhog Day in between them. It was about day four or five, and the sharp, soul-crushing depression that starts on the pier and gets worse while you’re climbing down the hatch into the boat had passed and settled into a smoldering ember of depression deep in my gut. As long as something was going on, I could ignore it. Before I get to crush depth in this story, there are some things that you should know about life on a submarine. The first thing is that most of the crew then worked 8-hour shifts. You had eight hours when you were on watch and at your assigned station of duty, whatever that was. Then, you had eight hours where you could do laundry, get some training done, or maybe participate in a PlayStation football tournament. After that, you had eight hours to sleep, and then you do it all over again, like Groundhog Day. Those were the rules for the ship’s company. I was not ship’s company. I was what they called a ‘rider.’ I was along to complete a single mission that had very little to do with the day-to-day of the submarine itself. <a href="https://medium.com/@dylan_combellick/the-trials-of-seaman-kelly-2faf1b6cc5a5">Learn More</a>