USD Magazine, Winter 2003

On duty, however, decom– pression is exactly what Schultz constantly sought to avoid. Only days after his first foray under the ice, he made it through another tight squeeze, this time with only 17 feet between the top of the vessel's sail and the bottom of the ice. Schultz nearly breaks into a cold sweat recalling how he sat in the center of the control room, his face awash in a rain– bow of colors from the glowing computer screens, sonar machines and monitors that tracked his every move.The only sound, he says, was the steady voice of his fathometer, a crew member

usually his only window to the world. His duty shift was six hours on, 12 hours off, and he says only the meals at the begin– ning and end of each watch marked the passage of time. "Of course, we don't have sunrise or sunset, and the lights are on all the time, but I knew that if they served pancakes at the end of my shift it was morn– ing," says Schultz, who turns the navigational chores over to jun– ior crew when he's not at the helm. "I usually just sat in the din– ing room in a catatonic state and ate whatever they happened to

- and then he takes into account what I've done in the real world. I'm sure my work with the ice caps made a difference." At SO feet high and 326 feet long, the Helena weighs in at 7,800 tons - not exactly a Skinny Minnie. Typically she swims in 100 fathoms (600 feet) of water, but during this particular deployment, Schultz frequently forced the sub to suck it up and churn through waters where she nearly scraped her belly on the sea bottom. During the two-month deployment, Schultz spent two weeks under the polar ice caps without the use of a periscope,

~ crew who calls out the water depth. "Because we were in such shallow water, he called out the depth every time it changed by a foot," Schultz says. "It was kind of eerie to hear his voice - 26 feet, 25 feet, 24 feet.That was the extent of the noise. "I had to maintain the ship's angle at plus-or-minus one-eighth of a degree, which is a monu– mental task," Schultz adds. "There were many moments when I held my breath until I knew we'd made it through." - Krystn Shrieve

serve while I stared off into space and decompressed."

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