UBOOT-Patrol #10 (October 1940)

We played our next patrol yesterday morning in our Virtual Wargaming rendition of the the boardgames UBOOT. I am feeling quite a bit more comfortable with my duties as the Navigator. Still working on getting my plots right but am getting there.

We started off the game with more detailed information about what our mission actually is and some detailed maps of our mission. Our main mission is to find the best approach for an attack on the naval station at Scapa Flow. As you can see below, both our reconnaissance mission and the subsequent attack might be a challenge as the naval station is very well protected. 

We were also given more detailed maps of each of the 3 approaches including a rough estimation of the depth of each channel. The southerly approach is clearly the deepest but at the same time the one that is best protected as it is the obvious approach. I believe our captain Eero is still considering which channel to take, but it has been clearly decided that our approach will be from the north with our U-boat taking the passage between Iceland and the Faroe Islands and then going south probably with the Shetlands to our east.

This was a fairly eventful patrol of about 27 hours through 4 watch changes. Heikki has activated the "Event Story Board" causing regular events on the ship. We had quite a few Engineering events, it seems the ship is falling apart but it was discovered early in this patrol that there was probably a saboteur aboard!  Perhaps, this might explain the difficulty the engineers are having. We also had an important Radio event informing us that we could pick up supplies from another U-boat that was returning to port. I had a bit of difficulty plotting our course so we were 3 hours late but I suspect I will get better. We picked up some supplies and also were able to exchange a wounded crewman with a broken leg and replace one of my observers who had fallen overboard. We also had a number of Navigator events where enemy ships were spotted but our captain decided to stay well away and focus on our mission. Our sessions usually last a little under 3 hours at ended at 0300h, half way through our 5th watch of the session.

Dark blue open circle is target, yellow blocks are known minefields. Dark blue dotted line is our known course, light blue is our plotted course. The light blue circle is where I thought I was when we changed course for the rendezvous. Damned northerly winds!

I am having a lot of fun with this.