STORIES Timekeepers: Francois Dupont, Submariner

Could you briefly introduce yourself?

My name is François Dupont, and I was a naval officer for 40 years – mostly as a submariner. Today, perhaps, I’m coming to an age where I’m no longer encouraged to mess about on boats – especially submarines! But I’ve had a long and fascinating career. 

In fact, my first project out of Naval School in the 1980’s was something pretty out of the ordinary. I was part of the design team making the new class of French submarines – the Triomphant class. Eventually I was appointed as the very first Commanding officer of the first crew. So when I arrived in Cherbourg, fresh out of training, the submarine was still in pieces, and when I left we had travelled to her maximum depth. This was an extraordinary time in my life – I’ll never forget it.

What is your first memory of being on a boat? When did you get a taste for the sea?

I have very vivid childhood memories of the trips we took when my parents lived in Morocco and we came to France regularly during the Summer holidays. We took a boat from Casablanca to Marseille – it wasn’t a long journey, but I felt a great deal of happiness. The purring of the engines, the whirring of the ventilators – they put me in a wonderful cocoon of safety; and then going out on the bridge, there was this infinite horizon that showed how small we really are. Even today, when I look at the sea, I feel that.  

Could you take us aboard a submarine? Or at least tell us what life on board is like?

The Triomphant, which I helped build and ended up commanding in the 1980s, is a 14,000 tonne boat, 138 meters long and 12.50 m in diameter. She dives to over 300 meters deep – but the maximum depth is a well-guarded secret! The space inside is quite small. It’s about 300 square meters for 111 people, which isn’t much. 

Above all, it’s a highly complex technological machine, in which there are many, many instruments. It’s said to be the most complicated technological device created on Earth.  And even though you’re locked inside a thick shell, you don’t have time to feel confined, because there are too many things to do. A huge number of instruments to check. And life is highly structured.

What does it feel like to be onboard?

Firstly, patrols last 70 days, almost a whole season – it’s a long time. So there’s a real personal discipline required. Life is regulated by shifts – the day is separated into two, three, or four  hour increments, during which a particular team takes charge of the boat. So these shifts punctuate life, day or night, as the boat is moving constantly.  

 The days are 24 hours long – there’s no escaping that. But to mark the difference between day and night, we change the lighting on board. During the day, the passageways are lit with a warm, yellow-white light, and at night we change to red light to signify the change. It helps the time flow more naturally.

I find that when you’re in command, you have to take the internal ‘weather’ into account –  the atmosphere on board has as much of an effect as the conditions outside! And then of course, if you spend Christmas and New Year’s at sea, the thoughts of your crew are likely to be elsewhere… so we have to be all the more vigilant.  

And how do you measure time once you’re on board?

Time is of the essence for a sailor – because without it, unless you have super-human knowledge of the stars and the weather, you can’t really know your location. So we take a certain point of latitude and longitude, then we move according to direction and speed to another point. So, to know where you are at any given moment, you have to know the time with absolute precision. This way of navigating goes back hundreds of years. 

We also have what’s called a timekeeper on board. This is probably the most important technology of all – because if time starts to drift, we no longer know where we are! And the time is displayed everywhere, including in the commander’s room. Even if you wake up in the middle of the night, the first thing you see is the depth of the boat and then the time. 

What does that ‘timekeeper’ look like?

At one point, it was a pendulum – an incredibly precise chronometer, in a part of the boat where it could never be moved. And every day, we’d measure the difference between the speaking clock, the universal clock, and the chronograph and reset. This is how it was done for many years, but now we have extremely precise clocks which have virtually no drift. And on some submarines, we have ‘inertial units’; these are equipped with very, very high precision clocks, linked up with technical tools, allowing us to know both our speed and direction. 

This notion of time is almost like the sailor’s philosophy. It’s not the same kind of time you’d use for a plane trip that lasts five or six hours, or for a 100m race. It’s a more exacting kind of time, as it cannot drift for successive days, weeks, even months.

In a submarine, are you travelling at high speeds? 

The average pace is only about 10 to 15 km/h, but a submarine never stops moving. We mainly look for performance in what’s called radiated noise, i.e. the noise emitted by the submarine, since this is what would allow detection by an enemy. So a good submarine is a quiet one, rather than a fast one – even if she is capable of high speeds. 

Sound is more important than vision on a sub, because beyond a certain depth, you can barely see in any direction. The only way to detect the environment around you is with hydrophones, which can detect sound at great distances. You learn in a submarine not to see but to listen. What’s interesting is that this also influences the behaviour of people onboard – submariners are people who really listen. Even if I am doing the opposite now, haha! 

How do you relate to time today?

What strikes me a lot today is that everything is moving very quickly, possibly too fast. Ultimately, what’s happening right now, requires everyone, no doubt, to look at the bigger picture. We do not know when or if we will return to a normal life, or what it will look like. Your generation will invent a new way of life which will be very different… It interests me greatly, to see which avenues will open up.  We found ourselves embroiled in a life that didn’t allow anyone to think and take their time – maybe that will change. 

If you could time travel, where would you like to go?

I don’t necessarily want to find myself in the time of Magellan or Christopher Columbus. But I’m quite excited about the journey toward the future; I think that now is the time to try and find a way out of the complexity in which we find ourselves. So this time, here and now, interests me – even if it can be frightening sometimes.

What interests me is this endless, infinite sense of time I get when I look at the sea. It’s very reassuring. The rise and fall of the tides. Whatever happens in the rest of the world, you know that the sea will rise, it will reach its peak, and then fall, and go out, and begin again. There’s a certain kind of permanence in that, which reassures me greatly.