One afternoon Michelson was steaming along in the Med. I was on watch in the survey control center tending the tempermental Loran C. The duty oceanographer was reading a book. Then the lights went out, Loran C died, the sonar quit pinging and the air conditioning stopped. The ship slowly came to a halt. The engines had quit. There was no electricity. We were dead in the water, a dark ship.
Survey control was the only space on the ship with real windows, not portholes. We opened the curtains a bit to let some light in. A watertight hatch (W.T. Hatch) opened aft onto the weather deck. We could let some fresh air inside.
Outside the front door there was a commotion in the chart room. Captain Bondeson was on the bridge. Something serious had gone wrong in the engine room. Fortunately the seas were calm. A ship without power is helpless in heavy weather.
After a while, Michelson's emergency generator started up outside. At that time I didn't know there was one. It had one real purpose, not for the ship's domestic power, but to restart the engines. The fuel needed to be heated and pumped to the burners to get the boilers going.
After about an hour in the dark the lights came on again. All the electronics had to be warmed up, restarted and checked out. We resumed going wherever we had been headed.
A common mode failure affecting both boilers must be very unusual. Perhaps somebody was negligent about cleaning out the fuel strainers. I had never seen this happen before. Never saw it again either. There was no explanation offered, perhaps to protect the guilty!
