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Long-serving rescue submarine replaced

A 37-year era came to an end Wednesday when the Navy’s last rescue submarine was taken out of service, replaced by a new system offering greatly improved flexibility.

The Mystic (DSRV 1) was a small, 49-foot-long minisub able to dive nearly a mile beneath the ocean’s surface to rescue sailors trapped in a sunken submarine. It was the first of two submersibles the Navy built following the 1963 loss of the submarine Thresher. The other deep submergence rescue vehicle, Avalon, was inactivated in 2000.

Neither mini-sub had the chance to carry out a real underwater rescue, but just knowing the craft were available improved morale.

“They were there, they would have been capable if they were needed,” said Mickey Garverick, director of the Naval Submarine League and a former submarine commander.

The DSRVs have been replaced by the tongue-twisting Submarine Rescue Diving and Recompression System’s Rescue Capable System, described by the Navy as a rapidly deployable rescue asset that can be delivered by air or ground, installed on military or commercial vessels of opportunity, and mated to a distressed submarine within 72 hours.

That contrasts with the DSRVs, which, although capable of being transported aboard large Air Force transport aircraft, still needed to be carried to the scene of a distressed submarine aboard a specially configured mother sub.

“The DSRV was mobile but it was a big effort to get it ready to go,” Garverick said.

Mystic was operated by the Navy’s Deep Submergence Unit at San Diego, which is now operating the SRDRS. The new system was tested this spring during the international submarine rescue exercise Bold Monarch in the North Sea and with a Chilean submarine off San Diego in mid-September.