Project ARTEMIS

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Project ARTEMIS was a project undertaken by the United States Navy in the 1960s, whose goal was to produce a Sonar system that could detect submarines at long range.

                        Project ARTEMIS

The Navy entered into a contract with J. Ray McDermott to build the Argus Island Texas Tower Research Platform on the Bank in 200 feet of water just southwest of Bermuda. It was constructed in 1960 and finally toppled in 1976. Unfortunately non-scientists wrote the specs. Among their mistakes was looking at cores and grab samples of the Bank surface and finding small fragments of black rock in them. They deduced that it was lava and J. Ray charged for drilling the legs into hard lava rather than soft carbonate. The black specs dissolved in hydrochloric acid leaving a few bits of black organic crust floating in the acid. The “lava” was organically coated limestone but the taxpayers paid through the nose on that one. Unfortunately I did not get into this loop until the contract had been let. The Project was intended to ensonify the Atlantic Ocean and detect Russian submarines as they came thru the GIUK Gap and across the N Atlantic Ocean. Originally the Artemis projector was to be placed on the bottom and oriented magnetically, to compass bearings. There was, however, a huge magnetic anomaly near the site on the Bank. I believe it may have been a huge mass of magnetite in the original volcano. In any case that knocked the magnetic orientation in the head. The Mission Capistrano was the proposed broadcasting projector for Artemis. It was a T-2 tanker converted by addition of a center well and a MEGAwatt projector that could be lowered through the well. I doubt that it ever projected at full power because it would probably have boiled water at the face of the transducers and everyone in the water in Bermuda would have had skin tingles. A megawatt is a lot of power. The receiving array was composed of about ten strings of buoyed towers with multiple hydrophones on each, attached to specially built cables which were laid down the sides of the Bank. They were spaced rather precisely so that they formed a giant receiver that could be electronically steered and amplified. We installed it after Argus Island, the Texas Tower, had been built to receive the cables, massage the data and squirt it back to the ONR facility at Gibbs Hill Lighthouse on Bermuda via another underwater cable. The top of each tower had a 3 foot aluminum sphere for flotation. These were shipped from the States carefully encased in a wooden box to prevent the aluminum oxide coating on the spheres from being nicked. The oxide is extremely corrosion resistant. The raw aluminum under the oxide coating is quite corrodible. When the spheres were moved with forklifts they were nicked and the unoxidized Al quickly corroded. When the aluminum spheres on the hydrophone stacks failed by corrosion, this let the stacks fall over and negated the usefulness of an enormously expensive array. What a shame that we could not put slings on them and attach a new float of some more durable material. I have no idea if they ever got any useful information from Project Artemis. During the pre-installation studies and the installation itself, I was tasked to assist Cdr. Joseph Pinning in any way possible. Joe was the ONR Resident Representative in Bermuda. His “handle” was “Marine Band”. That was to confuse the Russian ELINT ships that hovered around Bermuda during most of the year. My “handle” was “Barracuda Bait”. That way when we talked the Russkies didn’t know who we were. RIGHT!!! One day the Ekvator, a Russian trawler called on our frequency. “Marine Band, Marine Band, Marine Band; Cdr. Pinning, we just wanted to say hello to you and Barracuda Bait, Dr. McAllister!” Boy did we have them fooled. Joe was a prince of a guy and he had a Chief working for him, Chief Frank Morrison. Frank was one of the most ingenious guys I ever met and the world’s best scrounger and midnight requisitioner. We worked well together. One day Pinning told me that if he ever wanted the Empire State Building moved across the street, he’d choose Frank and me to do it. It was quite a compliment. I did anything I could to help. I was aboard the USS Accokeek?, a Navy tug, which was trying to get a line on a 6 foot Navy spherical buoy. They tried repeatedly to lasso it from the deck of the tug. I asked the skipper why they did not swim a line over to it. He was horrified. “That is not the Navy way” he said. After a half hour of this I put on fins and faceplate and as they missed again, I jumped over and swam to the buoy and managed to clamber aboard and drop the line over it. Needless to say they were glad I did. Sometime during the operation the cable repair ship, USS Yamacraw, commanded by Lt. Cdr. “Moose” Sharon, came in to do cable repairs on the twenty one quad cable back to Bermuda. 84 wires in twenty one bundles of 4 twisted wires, armored, made up the 21 quad. I went on deck to help, learned fast and pretty soon they were actually letting me splice 21 quad. After we were done, the chief Western Electric cable splicer told me his salary and said I could triple my salary if I wanted to splice conductor cable for Western Electric. The project Artemis investigators wanted samples of the bottom on Plantagenet Bank, the 180 foot bank nearest Bermuda. I was asked to get the samples. Once when I was swimming down the side of the Navy tug, someone flushed the heads on me. Understand that all heads are secured during diving operations. Years later, at an Ocean Event in Fort Lauderdale, I mentioned this to one of the UDT guys giving a talk. I told him I thought they did it on purpose! He replied “Of course they did!” The UDT Team 21 was obviously unhappy to have a civilian along. After a lot of grumbling and complaints about the G D civilian, we went over the side on a line to the bottom. About three-quarters of the way down the two senior Navy men, Lt. Roy Boehm and a Chief got narcotic. The chief had a very expensive underwater camera with him; a cylinder about 2 feet long and 6 or 8 inches in diameter. Held the long way with the lens sticking out of the side, it was attached to the Chief by a lanyard around his neck. He tore hell out of his neck trying to throw the camera away in his hung over and narcotic state after partying all night before. The First Class and I got to the bottom and started the sampling when I saw an enormous sickle tail just disappearing in the distance. Visibility was at least 180 feet and you could read a newspaper on the bottom. I swam up 20 or so feet to where Boehm was hanging on the line (and the Chief was still trying to throw the camera away) and asked Roy, in sign language, what to do about the 15 foot shark. He gave me an OK sign so I went back to work. When we got to the surface, the Chiefs neck was all raw where the lanyard cut him, Boehm did not even remember my asking him about a shark and the First Class told me I was good enough to dive with him any day. Finally Argus Island was ready, the YFNB-12 had been converted to lay the special cables with the fifty foot aluminum towers to be attached and we put to sea for Argus. The YFNB-12 was outfitted with a long track way above the deck, with a narrow tunnel running along under the track. Forward of that was a huge double winding machine that was to unreel the 2 inch+ heavy wire rope that would be anchored to explosive embedment anchors shot deep into the coral top of the bank. It was unreeled under very high tension until the end of the 2 inch wire came off the double winch attached to a 4 or 5 inch multi-conductor cable to which, in turn, the towers were attached. There were takeouts fastened into the big cable at predetermined intervals from which the pigtails for the aluminum tower hydrophones were taken. The towers, carried on deck, were lowered to the cable and a yoke fitted over the metal takeout, which was connected to the armor wires around it. After testing, the tower was conducted over the stern and held upright by the aluminum flotation sphere. The armored cable was then paid out under tension to hold the array of towers in a predetermined line down the side of the seamount. One cable was almost off the second of the winding machines/winches when someone noticed that there were only a couple of strands of armor still attached to the cable. The rest of the armor wires had broken going around the drums! We halted the forward motion, decided that if we were to save the string we’d have to put a stopper on the 2 inch steel wire before the last couple of strands broke. I believe they told me that they had 40,000 lbs of tension on the wire rope all through this exercise and couldn’t slack it lest they stray off line. Frank Morrison and I volunteered to put a huge Carpenters Stopper on the wire rope and fasten it to massive padeyes on deck until they reterminated the armored cable! We got down in the five or six foot wide tunnel with the stopper and started to work. They had cleared everyone else out of the way, for if the cable let go it would roar through the tunnel, probably killing both Frank and me and they did not want anyone else killed. It was some kind of exciting operation. Every few seconds the cable would move a quarter inch with a horrible noise. We worked feverishly but took 15 or 20 minutes to get it stopped off. When we signaled OK, the entire crew cheered Frank and me. I later got a commendation from the Admiral Kroll, Oceanographer of the Navy and another from Admiral Coates, Chief of Naval Research and I’m sure it was primarily for this job. Frank and I became buddies tempered by sharing the possibility of an instantaneous but horrible death together.

When the YFNB-12 was attempting to pass cable to Argus Island, she couldn’t get close enough because of the extending tramway, sticking 50 or 75 feet behind. After half a dozen throws of a line with a monkey’s fist on the end, all falling short, I radioed my dive crew on Argus Island and told them to jump in, grab the monkey’s fist and swim it to the Tower. They did and once again proved that swimmers can be extremely valuable. The Artemis array file is still classified and would have all of my pictures and many others of the YFNB-12, Argus Island, the special cable and the takeouts, the towers and flotation spheres, and the Mission Capistrano. Argus Island was toppled into the 200 foot water on Argus Bank in 1976, permanently ending this Project.