Tilt-o-meter, puke level.
While on my first Aircraft Carrier, the U.S.S. Saratoga, I was young and everything was a new experience. When I finally got to work in my shop after ship board training, safety classes, mess duty, etc. I got to meet Chief Skinner. While I stood at attention in front of his desk listening to him say blah blah blah, I noticed a sheet of paper thumbtacked to the particle board behind his desk. Hanging from the thumbtack was a string and at the end was a needle. At the bottom and middle of the paper was a nicely hand written ZERO. On the left and the right of the zero was a 1,2,3,4,5 etc. This completely non-scientific meter was designed to measure the list of the ship. Our shop was positioned amid-ship, another words, it would measure the movement from starboard to port (right to left) as our shop was just about in the dead center of the ship, 2 decks under medical and dental, which were on the main deck amid-ship. I suppose medical and dental were required to be there as they needed to have the least movement while they are taking out your appendix or removing your molars while at sea.
Let me paint a better picture of the tilt-o-meter though. Imagine the face of a small clock. The needle pointed down where the 6 would be, which showed zero list pretty much all of the time, as the Saratoga weighed 81,000 TONS. It took a lot of water or waves to move it. Where the 9 and the 3 would have been were the numbers 45 and there were little tick marks in between. So there were TEN tick marks between where the 6 and 7 and the 6 and 5 would have been and 10 more tick marks between 7 and 8 but 25 marks between where the 8 and 9 would have been. Like I said, nonscientific.
I would imagine that no one would ever be left alive if the needle actually hit the 45 on this tilt-o-meter as we would have rolled over on our side. So every now and then we would run into some inclement weather and you would actually feel a bigger than normal list and we would run to the Chiefs office and ask the Chief or LPO where the tilt-o-meter went to. None of the veteran sailors had ever seen the tilt-o-meters’ needle go beyond the 7th tick mark on either side. This was not to scale, so whoever made it was just playing around, yet there it was, always available for a frame of reference when we did feel the ship move.
Now when an aircraft carrier rolls at sea, it is a very slow motion. You really don’t feel it, it is so slow you just get used to it very quickly. You can see that the ship is listing because if you look at the sailors walking in front of you, as you can see that they are leaning one way or the other. I never heard of anyone getting sea sick on a carrier. Um… up to this point.
So here I was on my way home from my second cruise in August 1980, which had been extended by 5 weeks from the normal 6 months because them thar Iranians had our 52 hostages for 444 days. We were patrolling in the Mediterranean Ocean because they diverted the USS Kennedy to the Gulf to deal with that situation. That messed up things with deployments all over the Navy. Any who, a carrier will usually maneuver around a storm, but we ALL wanted to get back to Mayport, Florida as soon as possible, so this time, Captain Flatley, III, took us right into the storm.
We were all talking about how much the ship was listing and we were checking the tilt-o-meter consistently as none of us had ever felt the ship move so much. It was regularly showing a 4 and 5 and sometimes a 6 on the meter. All work was stopped as we were securing items that were beginning to move around and or fall off shelves, etc. The ship was on lock down, all the outside hatches were secured, all the planes and equipment were brought down and crammed into the hanger deck area and the two HUGE hanger bay doors, that never closed, were closed. Many of us just went walking around to see how it felt to really move on a ship. I though was just coming back from the storeroom and was using the passageway that went through the medical and dental area. I was walking toward the starboard side and as I was just about exactly amidships when we took a hard jolt and a huge list to starboard. I heard a loud crash of class and what sounded like utensils and pills spilling in the dental room next to me as I was propelled forward down the passageway. So here I was, about to take a right at the corner but the list was so steep that I had to actually put my left foot on the wall for balance as I turned right. Well I knew that was a massive wave or something so I regained my balance and headed for the shop, down 2 flights of step ladders, hanging on for dear life, and into the shop. I wanted to check out the tilt-o-meter of course. When I opened the shop door all I saw was chaos. Just about everything that was on top of anything was now on the floor. There was a huge punch card interpreter that NEVER moved because it was so heavy that it had sunk into the linoleum tile. We just mopped and waxed around that thing, but that last wave had caused it to move out of the davit it had always been in and it had almost killed Frank as he was now pinned between it and his keypunch machine (see attached picture for what a 1701 Univac keypunch machine looked like) and the other guys were trying to move the machine back. Forget that, I wanted to know what number we hit on the meter. Well, everyone else was in the office kind of freaking out. The tilt-o-meter had hit 14!
So, a few of us decided to go up to the hanger deck and see if any planes and or stuff had also gotten dislodged up there. There were the sailors, scrambling around using chains to re-secure million dollar jets and equipment and such just as we suspected, but the funny thing was the frequent piles of vomit all over the hanger deck. Someone relabeled the tilt-o-meter.
Now, right next to the # 14 tick mark on either side of the zero was “PUKE TIME”.
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