Dolphin Scholarship Foundation Update

Heads-up! Dolphin Scholarship applications are due 15 March. That's only 2 months away. You can now do the application online at the Dolphin Scholarship website.

Here's the announcement from DSF:

Dolphin Scholarship Application now Available Online!

Students can now determine their eligibility and begin the 2009 application for the Dolphin Scholarship online through the DSF website, www.dolphinscholarship.org. Students may also download a paper application to mail to DSF.

A new requirement this year for all applicants is submission of the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) Student Aid Report (SAR) showing the Expected Family Contribution (EFC) to DSF. Another new requirement for discharged and retired sponsors is submission of the DD214.

The 1000^th Dolphin Scholar will be selected in April 2009.

Complete eligibility requirements and applications are available at www.dolphinscholarship.org.

Application deadline is March 15, 2009. For more information, please contact Mary Bingham, DSF Scholarship Administrator, at scholars@dolphinscholarship.org or (757) 671-3200 ext. 111.

Race to the North Pole!

First, lest we forget, yesterday was the 45th anniversary of the tragic loss of USS THRESHER (SSN-593). The Sub Report had a link to this article. I was surprised by the detailed description and the computer-graphic animation of what happened to the THRESHER that were on the wikipedia page. In the wake of the loss of the THRESHER, the submarine force implemented a robust Quality Assurance (QA) program, in addition to some important design and procedural modifications. The submarine QA program is what ensures that we have the same number of surfaces as we have dives.

To the officers, crew and families of THRESHER and all the other submariners on eternal patrol, God bless you and may you rest in peace.

On a happier note, I received a really nice email from the Executive Director of the Dolphin Scholarship Foundation about my previous blog post.

In honor of the U.S. Submarine Force's birthday TODAY, April 11th, the DSF has kicked-off a virtual submarine Race to the North Pole. It starts TODAY and lasts through August 3rd. You can make donations in any amount under the name of any submarine. Right now, the website shows USS NAUTILUS is in the lead, with SILVERSIDES, GROTON, and BLACKFIN following behind. If any of you aren't sure which boat to vote for, just click on the Mighty MSP in the pull-down menu.

Aside: If I thought there were more people interested in naming another ship USS OREGON besides just me, I would propose a campaign for us to have the USS OREGON win the race to the North Pole as a gesture to the Navy leadership that the TIME HAS COME FOR OREGON! I have a feeling nobody shares my enthusiasm on that topic though.

Anyway, back to the Race to the North Pole topic...


For anyone who hasn't been under the polar ice cap before, it's a tight squeeze getting through the Bering Strait. The emblem for the Arctic Submarine Lab is a SCALE drawing of the clearances a 688-Class submarine has squeaking through the strait.


When I went through the Bering Strait, the closest we got was an ice keel passing 17 feet over the top of the sail, with 20 feet of clearance between the keel and the muddy bottom. Yes, there are deeper ice keels, like the one pictured on the right side of the ASL logo above, but you have to drive around those like a slalom. Keep in mind, a 6,900 ton nuclear submarine doesn't exactly turn on a dime. As an Officer of the Deck driving through there, you stare intently at the sonar display, because as soon as you detect an ice keel out in front of you, you've gotta put the rudder over and get the ship started turning to keep from hitting it.

Oh, check out the Arctic Submarine Lab website for some cool photos and videos of submarines breaking through ice and stuff.

Anyway, back to the DSF news:

Our Board of Directors has recently voted to increase the annual amount of the scholarship, to $3400! Tomorrow we will select 44 new Dolphin Scholars, and their potential scholarship over 4 years will be worth $13,000. The Board's goal is to eventually award scholarships of $4,000 each. Don't forget DSF when your sons are seniors in high school!

WRT the DSF Cartoon Calendars: Apparently I was wrong about the calendars. They aren't a big money-maker for the DSF, but they continue to do them as a matter of tradition. I've always been a big fan of the calendars and hope they will continue to keep the tradition going.

Dolphin Scholarship Auction

In any given submarine home port, there are a few big ticket events you can count on each year: the Navy Birthday Ball in October, the Submarine Birthday Ball in April, and the Dolphin Scholarship Auction sometime in the winter. Saturday night was the Dolphin Scholarship Auction here in Pearl Harbor.

For those who aren't familiar with this tradition, here's a quick explanation. The Dolphin Scholarship Foundation gives scholarships to the children of submariners and those who have supported the submarine force (submarine bases and submarine tenders for example). From the DSF website:

Beginning in the 2007-2008 academic year, Dolphin Scholarship Foundation will award 137 scholarships of $3,250 per year to each Dolphin Scholar. Each recipient may potentially receive a total of $13,000 for up to four years of undergraduate study. The number of new awards granted each year is determined by graduation and attrition of current Dolphin Scholars. Dolphin Scholarship Foundation is proud to have awarded in excess of 6.6 million dollars to almost 1000 students attending universities and colleges through the United States.

The two biggest annual fund raisers for DSF are the cartoon calendar and the auction.

For the calendars, every year they have a contest for people to draw submarine related cartoons, and the top 12 winners are put into the DSF calendar that they sell in the fall. Several years ago they published a nice hard-bound book of the cartoons - you can find it listed on Amazon here.

For the auction, every submarine homeport has a charity auction in the late winter / early spring. The local Submarine Officers Wives Club (SOWC) solicits donations for both a silent auction (for items valued less than $500) and a verbal auction (for items valued more than $500). Traditionally, each submarine wardroom puts together a themed-package and donates it to the auction. The evening of the auction is usually a pretty big event and a big deal.

This year's theme in Pearl Harbor was A Night on the Red Carpet and was made up to be like a night at the Oscars. It was really well organized - my compliments to the SOWC ladies who organized it.

The silent auction had a bunch of nicely framed classic submarine movie posters, paintings, crafts, and gift certificates to local stores, restaurants, and attractions.

In the Silent Auction, one of my JO's bought a ginormous painting of a submarine doing an emergency blow. I'm not sure where he's going to find space to hang it in his townhouse, but then, I know I've got more stuff to hang on my walls than I have walls to hang them on, too.

For the big ticket items, the most coveted is the 2-Star Party - wine tasting and dinner with the admiral at his house on Ford Island while being served by the CSP N-heads (O-6 dept heads). My wardroom pooled our money and put a bid on it, but we didn't win. Some of the other items in the verbal auction were:

- A really nice framed print of USS WAHOO in her final resting place in the La Perouse Strait north of Japan. Granted, it was a little morbid, but it was really well done. It ended up selling for $800!!

- A paintball party (admission for like a dozen people and all the equipment and paintballs you needed), there was a very nicely stocked humidore.

Aside: Note that many of these package deals you see at the Dolphin Scholarship auctions are for a group of around 15 or more people so that the members of a wardroom can chip in and buy a party for their wardroom to do together.

- A very nicely stocked 50 bottle wine fridge that went for like $900.

- There were a couple of packages that included a room at the Turtle Bay resort for the night of the Submarine Birthday Ball (April 19th). LW and I sure would like to get a room at the hotel that night so we don't have to drive all the way back from the northern tip of the island, but they want like $240 per room and that just seems a little too steep for me. I wonder how much a cab ride would cost?

- A nice, patriotic, hand-made quilt that went for like $1300.

- A couple of golf related items like a set of custom golf clubs and a day of golf at a nice course on the island.

- A round trip fare for two on the Super Ferry to Maui and a rental car on the island.

- I think the theme I liked the most in the verbal auction was the USS KEY WEST's "Casablanca" package. I forget all the details of the stuff in their package, but the theme was based on the movie Casablanca, and it included a nice dinner at a local Morroccan restaurant for like twenty people.

Aside: I had never seen the movie Casablanca until fairly recently. It's one of my CO's favorite movies, so we watched it in the wardroom one night underway. It was actually pretty good, and now I understand why it's such a "classic." It was also interesting hearing how many famous one-liners that are part of our everday culture come from that movie.

Anyway, LW has been sick and had a fever, so she stayed home while I went to the auction Saturday night. I had to leave the auction early anyway in order to go to work, so I didn't get to see how much our package went for or who won the 2-Star party with the admiral. I was glad I went for the little bit that I got to see though. Like I said, it was very well organized and excuted by the SOWC.

Weekend Recap

Oh so much to write about, where to begin?

Chapter 1. If offending babysitters were an Olympic sport, we'd be GOLD MEDALISTS.

It's been an expensive weekend with two babysitter nights in a row. Friday night, LW and I went to a social for the Dolphin Scholarship Foundation. We invited back the same babysitter I wrote about last time with my open-mouth-insert-foot maneuver on gaudy Christmas lights. She didn't seem to hold it against me, so that was good. She said at least the boys didn't handcuff her this time. ...Um... I'm sorry, they did WHAT???

Saturday night, we had our boat Christmas Party. Tangent: I know, it's a little late for a Christmas party. It's a bit of a challenge figuring out logistics of something like that when you've just arrived on the island, but the families are still working on moving to Hawaii through the course of the fall. Most places were already booked by the time we got here, and it just worked out better to make it a "Happy New Year" Boat Party instead. Besides, this way, we were able to present a bunch of end of year awards like Sailor of the Year, Junior Sailor of the Year, Blue Jacket of the Year, and Junior Officer of the Year. Plus we got to pin on one guys' dolphins and CAP another sailor to E-5. [Aside: The Command Advancement Program (CAP) gives Commanding Officers the ability to hand pick a very small number of sailors each year and promote them one rank.] It seemed like everyone had a great time. There were a lot of cool door prizes, and a lot of guys were getting up on the microphone singing karaoke. I'll be interested to see what videos end up on YouTube later.

Anyway, back to the babysitter story. The babysitter we used Friday night was busy Saturday night, but she told us she has a German exchange student staying with them and she would be willing to babysit for us.

Now, ES has been rather obsessed with military history, and WWII history in particular since we're surrounded by WWII history in Pearl Harbor. We keep having discussions with ES about the fact that yes, Japan and Germany WERE our enemies back during WWII, but that was a LONG time ago and they are both our FRIENDS now.

Ahem... So LW and I returned from the boat party and asked the babysitter how it went. She seemed a little sheepish and embarrassed. She alluded to ES asking her questions about Germany and WWII, but wouldn't tell us specifically what he said. I figure she didn't feel comfortable telling us about it because it was the first time we had met her that night and she didn't know us well. This morning, we tried interrogating ES to find out what he said that offended the babysitter, but he essentially plead the 5th and wouldn't tell us anything. YS in his 4-year-old confident innocence came right forward, proudly and cheerfully informing us that they handcuffed the new babysitter last night - as if it were a normal right of passage and an achievement ANY babysitter would be proud to share with her peers. We've told them that it's NOT OKAY to handcuff the babysitter anymore... if any babysitter ever agrees to come back to our house.

Disclaimer: Mind you, these aren't REAL handcuffs that would incapacitate her from taking action in an emergency. Our boys "handcuffs" are usually made of zoobs that are easy to pull apart. Still, if I were a 17 year old German girl being symbolically handcuffed and interrogated as if I were a WWII spy, I think I might be a little offended and might not go back to that house again.

Again... My mind is wandering back to the The Ransom of Red Chief for some strange reason.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Chapter 2. Okay, clearly, I was gone for some vital portions of ES's upbringing during some very sensitive and impressionable years.

Saturday, we went to the Hale Koa Pool. This was offered up to ES as a bribe for going to the dentist earlier this week. Plus, I wanted to knock out the requirements for ES's Cub Scout Swimming Belt Loop. One of the requirements was to, "Play a recreational game in the water with your den, pack, or family." I googled "swimming pool games" before we left the house and had a handful of games up my sleeve to play with the boys when we got to the pool. One of them was called Categories. You can click on the link if you want an explanation of the game, but the point of my story is that we each had to choose a COLOR.

So you ask yourself, "Self, what sort of colors would you think a 6 year old would choose?" Yellow? (His favorite color is yellow.) Orange? Red? Blue? Nice, primary, simple colors? Oh, no, my friend. I guessed EVERY primary color and all I got was a SMIRK in response from ES and LW! LW assured me she did NOT help him and HE came up with the color he chose on his own. The colors that came from my dear little 6-year old SON's mouth were FUSIA (heck, I can't even SPELL fuchsia close enough for my spell checker to tell me what the CORRECT spelling is - I had to ask LW), and TURQUOISE, and CONSTRUCTION orange (not just "orange" mind you - CONSTRUCTION orange) and SCHOOL BUS yellow. When it was my turn, I pulled out the big guns and used PERIWINKLE. I only knew that one because that's one of the character's names on Blue's Clues.

Aside: I didn't even know roughly what color fuchsia was until I asked LW. She gave me an education on where the name fuchsia came from ala wikipedia. It's actually named after the flower of the fuchsia plant. Who knew??? For the rest of you manly-men out there reading this who also had no clue what color fuchsia REALLY is, wikipedia says it's "reddish purple."


Tangent: As LW scrolled down the Wikipedia page, she came upon the section "Fuchsia in Human Culture" where it states, "In the handkerchief code of the gay leather subculture, wearing a fuchsia bandana means one has a spanking fetish." Um... okay... if THAT wasn't ALREADY TMI, LW clicked on the "hankerchief code" link and started giggling and reading aloud what some of the other codes mean. OMG I did NOT need to know any of that!!!

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Chapter 3. People have to WAIT in LINE???

Shifting topics, but still at the Hale Koa pool, we observed something new at the Hale Koa this time around. We've been there several times, and almost always on weekends. This was the first time we've seen a LINE of people waiting to get in. There wasn't a line when we got there, so we went right in and went to our usual back corner of the pool. We didn't realize that they limited how many people they let in to the pool until we were leaving about 1:30 p.m. The lady at the entryway who checked our IDs on the way in asked if we were leaving for the day so she could take our arm bands, and there was a line of about six people waiting to get in. I overheard one person explaining to another at the end of the line that the pool area was full and they had to wait for someone to leave before they would be allowed in.

Oh, and in spite of my advice in my last post about the Hale Koa pool, we managed to time our arrival PERFECTLY so we got there JUST as they blew the whistle for the "adult swim period" (no kids allowed in the pool for the first fifteen minutes of every hour).

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Chapter 4. The Birthday Boy

Once again, I don't know WHY our boys are OBSESSED with all things STAR WARS. It's not like we encourage it or anything...

Darth-YS
That little box hanging from his neck plays
either some pre-recorded Darth Vader
sayings, or it will also alter your voice as
you speak through the mask. (LW found
it on sale at the NEX for like 1/10th what
it cost on Amazon).

Sunday, since it was YS's birthday, we gave him his choice where to go for lunch. (You get three guesses what he chose, and the first two don't count.) We went to his favorite McDonald's with the big playground over behind the NEX. Otherwise, we spent a good portion of the afternoon playing Lego Star Wars (despite my efforts to convince him we should go for a hike). My thumbs were actually getting sore from playing so much XBox today.

Since we satisfied YS's daily chicken nugget fix at lunchtime, LW cooked up some fajita steak, sweet potato fries, and corn on the cob for dinner - all things that YS has been known to eat as an alternative to his favorite chicken nuggets. He actually loved the dinner and gobbled it all down. He even surprised LW and me by asking for "one of those taco things" (tortilla) and proceeded to put steak, sweet potato fries, and cheese in it, roll it up, and eat it. I guess it's time to take him back to California so he can get a California Burrito, eh? (California Burrito is like a carne asada steak burrito with french fries inside).

The Birthday Boy
Playing his favorite Lego Star Wars and enjoying
one of his race-car birthday cookies from Grandma.

Thanks to the holiday tomorrow, we're off to do some box car racing with the Cub Scouts. We'll be having YS's actual birthday party next weekend - this weekend we just had too many other plans.