The Gun Counter

The 7 missing sailors were found drowned in their berths. Skipper was airlifted and is in stable condition.

I guess it's a given his career is over. Any guess as to how this happened?

Missing Fitzgerald sailors found dead in flooded compartments - CNN
https://apple.news/Af2PaDohzQEqurbkjex-Dww

From what I was reading earlier, it looked as though the cargo ship missed with its first ramming attempt, then came around, and was more successful the second time.

According to BBC here:

Marine traffic records suggest the ACX Crystal made a sudden U-turn roughly 25 minutes before the collision with the USS Fitzgerald. It is not clear why it changed course.

Here is the traffic record

Jered wrote:According to BBC here:

Marine traffic records suggest the ACX Crystal made a sudden U-turn roughly 25 minutes before the collision with the USS Fitzgerald. It is not clear why it changed course.

Here is the traffic record

........was the boat captained by the caffeine spider?

Wouldn't be totally surprised if it turns out the guy conning the freighter was from Mindanao or a similar locale.

It doesn't matter, a DDG has enough ass to get out of the way of / avoid any freighter in open ocean. If I had been OOD, I cannot say that I would have been expecting something like this, but I have seen enough weird shit from foreign merchant* men that the watch teams are always keeping an eye on them, especially if they are CBDR.

* they know that Navy ships will maneuver around them, so they sometimes just keep going even if they are the give way vessel.

I doubt there there in the Muslim theories. That track is explanable by the freighter being on auto-helm, correcting course for a time on auto-helm after the collision. Then the helm was taken back into hands of a ship driver and returned towards the damaged USS to render assistance and loitering until released.

I read this morning all 7 missing sailors were recovered in flooded berthings. For those who haven't done damage control on a ship, this means someone had to make the decision to close and dog that hatch knowing there may well be people left in the berthing. I can't even begin to imagine what that individual is going through. As an M Div guy, none of us were ever going to have to make that decision.

The Fitz's Goat Locker has made an official statement that no official GoFundMe's are set up and any you donate to are suspect at best.
Fitz thread on Reddit

The thread makes clear, at least for me, the need for some help in shorter space than I could quote. I'm throwing a few bones their way via the USO link in the thread.

One of the seven dead is a local man but I mourn all seven. Fair winds and following seas, God speed, Gentlemen.

Jericho941 wrote:

Jered wrote:According to BBC here:

Marine traffic records suggest the ACX Crystal made a sudden U-turn roughly 25 minutes before the collision with the USS Fitzgerald. It is not clear why it changed course.

Here is the traffic record

........was the boat captained by the caffeine spider?

Based on the damage and the track, it appears that the USS Fitzgerald was the give way vessel. Very strange, the Captain was still in his at sea cabin at the time of collision. Typical standing orders would be to get him on the deck for any vessel inside of 10k yards or with a CPA < 5k yards (or something like that, it varies ship to ship). Why wouldn't he be up and on the deck.

The merchant may have done something wrong, but it still looks like the OOD screwed up big time (and thus the CO, because the CO approves the OOD).

R/