This expedition covered 3,100 miles in 20 days, a grueling, laborious, hazardous 20 days, the entire time in a steel tube riding below the surface of the frigid waters, the entire time having to carefully plot the course and the obstacles, and to zigzag its way through these lethal obstacles, all the while risking discovery. And to complicate matters there’s always the seafloor projections that also needed to be avoided. To further complicate matters, the Queenfish had only one propeller, which makes backing up an extremely difficult task. Each time the Queenfish had to reverse prop (and there were many, many times that it was necessary), the prop drags the stern (the rear of the ship) down and to the left. Another extreme complication was, to quote the author, "No depth soundings or bottom topography information from any source was in existence in 1970 for the largely uncharted Laptev, East Siberian, and western Chukchi seas…"

The sub had a number of extra measures fitted before departing to make the journey as safe as humanly possible: Fathometers for detecting and measuring the ice thickness overhead; a navigation system modified for high latitude (Conventional navigation systems are not reliable near either pole of the Earth); a steel-reinforced sail and hull to break through ice.

For navigation aids, the sub had a special under-ice sonar suite, which included an iceberg detector to detect deep-draft ice in the path of the sub and to identify open water areas, which naturally occur even in the heaviest of ice fields. The suite also included an acoustic array of transducers, which enabled the boat to determine ice-draft, or thickness beneath the surface, above the hull location prior to surfacing. It had depth-sounders to measure water depth beneath the keel, and a specially-designed secondary propulsion system, which could be lowered, rotated up to 180-degrees to either side, and used like a thruster when operating at slow speed either on the surface or submerged. It also had inertial navigational systems with gyro compasses, a satellite navigational system, and a radio-direction-finder system.

Unknown Waters takes us along on this tension-fraught journey, and puts us right inside the USS Queenfish in an amazing story of an amazing feat. All the preparation for a trip of this scope and magnitude required millions of manhours of preparation, training, construction and fitting of parts and systems before the sub could complete even one mile of its journey.

But even a top secret, clandestine submarine mission isn’t all work. One of USS Queenfish’s predecessors, the USS Seadragon, was the first to reach the North Pole submerged. She surfaced long enough for the crew to play a truly unique game of baseball. They put the pitcher’s mound as close to the North Pole as they could and then they played a short game in the subzero temperatures. What was unique about this? Think about it. If the pitcher’s mound is on the North Pole, a home run means that the base-runner circumnavigates the entire globe as he rounds the bases. When the batter hits into right field, he’s actually hitting the ball into tomorrow. And when the right fielder throws it back to the plate, he’s throwing it into yesterday.