Soviet submarine K-77
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| Career | Missing image Supennant.png Soviet Navy Ensign |
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| Ordered: | 1950s |
| Laid down: | 31 January 1963 |
| Launched: | 11 March 1965 |
| Commissioned: | 31 October 1965 |
| Decommissioned: | 1991 and 1994 |
| Fate: | restaurant, movie set, museum |
| Stricken: | 1994 |
| General Characteristics | |
| Displacement: | 3174 tons surfaced; 4137 tons submerged |
| Length: | (281 feet 9 inches) |
| Beam: | (31 feet 2 inches) |
| Draft: | 7 meters (23 feet) |
| Propulsion: | two 4000-shp D-43 and one 1750-shp 2D-42 diesel engines, two 3000-shp PG-141 main and two 500-shp PG-140 creep electrical motors, two screws |
| Speed: | 16.8 knots surfaced, 18 knots submerged (trial) |
| Endurance: | 800 hours submerged, stores for 90 days |
| Range: | 9000 nautical miles at 8 knots surfaced, 18,000 nm at 7 knots with additional fuel, 810 nm at 2.74 knots submerged |
| Depth: | 235 meters (775 feet) test, 365 meters (1200 feet) design |
| Complement: | 12 officers, 16 petty officers, 54 men |
| Armament: | four SS-N-3 Shaddock (P-5 or P-6), or SS-N-12 Sandbox (P-500 4K-80 Basalt) nuclear cruise missiles, six 533 mm (21-inch) bow torpedo tubes with 18 torpedoes, four 400 mm (16-inch) stern torpedo tubes with four torpedoes |
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K-77 was a project 651 (also known by its NATO reporting name of "Juliett class") cruise-missile submarine of the Soviet Navy. Her keel was laid down in the Krasnoye Sormovo shipyard in Gorky on 31 January 1963. She was launched on 11 March 1965, and commissioned on 31 October 1965 into the Northern Fleet.
K-77 was built later in the Juliett class, so her hull was conventional steel and her battery was of the conventional lead-acid type, rather than the austenitic steel and silver-zinc batteries used in the first Julietts.
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Career
The details of K-77’s career remain largely unknown. Juliett-class submarines were used to follow United States Navy aircraft carrier battle groups in the North Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. Circumstantial evidence indicates that K-77 often patrolled the Mediterranean, off the coast of West Africa, and at least once in the Caribbean Sea near the United States Virgin Islands. Papers found aboard her during inspection in Helsinki suggest that she had shadowed Norwegian Kobben-class submarines.
At some point in her career, K-77 (the K standing for крейсерская, kreyserskaya — "cruiser") was redesignated B-77 (the B standing for большая, bolshaya — "large"). In 1987, K-77 was withdrawn from the blue-water Northern Fleet and transferred to the Baltic Fleet. The redesignation and transfer could easily be related.
Retirement
The Soviet Navy began withdrawing the Julietts from active service beginning in 1988. K-77 was decommissioned sometime after 1991, and by the end of 1994, all Julietts had been retired.
Post-decommissioning
Finland
At the end of the Cold War, Finnish businessman Jari Komulainen, who was married to the only daughter of President of Finland Mauno Koivisto, used his influence as Finland's "first son-in-law" to convince the Russian government to lease him a Project 641 "Foxtrot", probably the ex-Soviet submarine B-39. Komulainen opened it to the public in Helsinki in the spring of 1993 as a tourist attraction. He then purchased two Juliett-class submarines, one Juliett replaced the Foxtrot in 1994, becoming a bar and restaurant as well as a tourist attraction. Komalainen believed that his restaurant had been "K-81," based on a metal plate discovered inside the boat. However, it later transpired that that plate and others bearing different numbers were provided for the crew to display on the submarine's sail during surface running to confuse NATO reconnaissance aircraft.
As a restaurant, K-77 was modestly successful but was not lucrative enough to satisfy Komulainen. In 1998, he leased his submarine to a Canadian promoter, who towed to Tampa Bay, Florida. However, the intended mooring location in the harbor was too shallow and the investors were forced to move the proposed tourist attraction to a more remote site. Soon, the promoter filed for bankruptcy, and K-77 reverted to Komulainen.
eBay
Komulainen did not want to repeat the nerve-wracking trans-Atlantic tow, and instead tried at least twice to auction the submarine on eBay -- auctions #222791130, ending on 20 December 1999, and #270148521, ending on 7 March 2000. In each case, bidding was to start at US$1 million. No bids were received.
Widowmaker
The eBay auction, however, caught the attention of Intermedia Film Equities, Limited, who chartered K-77 for US$200,000 and towed her to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to become the set for the motion picture K-19: The Widowmaker, starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson.
Museum
In 2002, after the movie wrapped, the submarine was purchased by the USS Saratoga Museum Foundation, towed to Collier Point Park in Providence, Rhode Island, and opened to the public in August 2002.
It was the Museum Foundation that determined that the submarine was K-77, based on the records they found aboard, which included maintenance reports, equipment exchanges, radio messages, duty rosters, log entries and torpedo firing exercises.