The guilty Pleasure of Testing Navy Inflatable Boats!

“You want to go for a ride?” The Senior Chief asked me, “we just got a new small inflatable boat and we’re taking it out to Ches Light before we accept it.” I knew what “accepting” Navy Inflatable Boats meant, we were going to have a blast!

As if he had to ask, “What are you kidding me? Lets go!”

I heard what the Special Boat Units did with them in the Gulf War; can you imagine diverting a complete Iraqi armored division in response to a few rubber boats? The Navy started buying more of these Rigid Inflatable Boats from Zodiac a couple of years ago. Man, they were awesome, or so I heard, I had not ridden in one yet. Finally, I was getting the chance.

As we were lowering the boat down the ramp, a sense of irony struck me. We were following all the boat ramp safety rules, which directly conflicted with the boats expected life. It was going to pushed out of helicopters, parachuted out of airplanes, shot at, huge explosions would nearly throw it out of the water, it was going to have a rough life.

This boat had all the bells and whistles. For a nine-meter open cockpit inflatable boat, it had radar, a gimbaled compass a global positioning system, a depth finder and mounts for all these cool guns. All of this in 1994, I think GPS only had five satellites then. The most ominous feature was the passenger seats. They were not seats at all, they were padded back rests and roller coaster type hand holds with a seatbelt, you kept your feet on the rigid deck, so you wouldn’t fly out.

Of course, with seniority came its privileges. The Senior Chief navigated past Little Creek Cove then past Desert Cove. You could see the poor stiffs who had real jobs that were pointing at us either pitying us because it was January or pointing at our shiny new RIB. We did not care, we were “testing."

The coxswain was a ruddy 5’8” Irishman; we called him leprechaun, of course not to his face, he could bench press 300 pounds. He cracked this devious little smile, as we passed the last buoy to starboard. He gingerly opened the throttle on the outboards to a mere twenty knots or so, just enough to get on a plane.

Then we passed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, headed for the open sea…

He open up the throttle and the engines roared to life with the ferocity of a big cat. I was in the bow of the open cockpit inflatable holding on to the two lines that traced along the outside of the hull. I must have looked like a chariot rider. Thankfully, the early morning sea was smooth and glassy, otherwise it would have been a bumpy ride.

I look back I wonder if I was an idiot for what I did next. I was young and dumb. I couldn’t help myself. As we were approaching Chesapeake Light at full speed, I peeked my head over the bow while holding myself in the boat with my legs to keep from flipping over the bow with my legs. The water was rushing a couple of feet from face at 40 knots. What was going by my face seemed as if it was going by at warp speed, almost like a child flying.

We headed back to Little Creek; we jumped a few wakes of freighters like a psycho jet skier and raced some cars on the Bridge-Tunnel. Speed on water is amazing, especially that feeling imagining I was flying.