CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
USS Halibut – Krusenstern Strait
To say the next five days were uneventful would be an understatement. We experienced the epitome of the “endless boredom” part of the classic definition of submarining – endless boredom interrupted by moments of sheer panic. Nothing to tell, really. We stayed deep and moved as fast as we could.
Basically, we aimed for a small active volcanic island about a third of the way down from Kamchatka named Chirinkotan, located about twenty miles west of Ekarma at the southern end of the Ekarma strait separating Ekarma and Shiashkotan. The island itself is a four-square-mile peak of an underwater mountain that extends about 2,200 feet into the sky – a nearly perfect volcanic cone. Chirinkotan, Ekarma, and another even smaller volcanic island –
