Norwegian fishermen were left stunned after they netted a £3.38 billion nuclear submarine.
The young men – all in their twenties – were out fishing for halibut in their 10-metre-long boat the Øygutt (Island Boy) in waters just west of Tromsø.
Having just hauled in a catch worth £1,500, the fishermen recast their nets hoping to find more halibut.
However, unbeknown to them, the USS Virginia was sailing near the surface when its propeller became entangled with part of their fishing net.
The 7,800-tonne and 115-metre-long submarine dragged the Øygutt for about two nautical miles.
Incredibly the young fishermen hadn’t realised anything was wrong until they received an urgent radio message from the Coast Guard.
“We had just emptied the nets and put them out again, and were on our way back to shore at Sommarøya when we were called by the Coast Guard on channel 16 on the VHF-radio,” the 22-year old captain Harald Engen told NRK Troms media.
The boat’s crew were able to cut the nets free, which will now have to be replaced at considerable cost.
“The (net) is at the bottom of the sea. It is gone, and we will probably never find it again,” Engen said.
Replacing the nets will cost between £2,837 and £3,547 – much more than the value of their catch.
The US Embassy in Oslo later confirmed that USS Virginia had been in the area at the time.
The US Navy uses the waters around Norway as a hub for resupply and crew changes in NATO’s ongoing surveillance of Russian naval activities.
Russian subs are regularly deployed from the Kola Peninsula in the northern Atlantic and are tracked by NATO.
The USS Virginia is part of a class of fast-attack submarines and is equipped with advanced sonar and stealth technology.
It is capable of reaching extreme depths and carries a range of torpedoes and Tomahawk missiles.
The nuclear-powered submarine is the lead ship of her class and was commissioned in august 2003.
