I was wondering about submarines especially how often they make port calls or not. I just can't decide whether to join the Silent Service or the Surface Warfare community :/ I do know that sub crews are a tight knit community and all that
I guess it depends if its an attack or missile sub? D:
If you get assigned to an SSBN, you can count on not going too many interesting places. Not sure about SSGN though.
I spent 3 years as an enlisted Electrician's Mate (nuke) on an attack submarine in Pearl, then another 3 as an instructor at a nuclear prototype. During my time on the boat, we did one Western Pacific deployment (WestPac), a few runs to the west coast, and my time onboard was sandwiched between two ice runs (just missed them). We had port visits in Hilo HI, Kona HI, Long Beach CA, San Diego CA, Bangor WA, Guam, Subic Bay PI, Sasebo Japan, Yokosuka Japan, and Hong Kong. I think some other boats had more port calls than us on deployment but we were busy.
Personally I think if you choose submarines you won't regret it. I wouldn't ask to go to an SSBN unless I needed a regular schedule for some reason (maybe that's just me). I believe the career path for a SWO nuke is very different from a submarine nuke. As a nuke officer on a submarine, you will be standing watch in the plant and qualifying very quickly in engineering, while also working on non-engineering quals and being a divison officer (probably 15-20 sailors and a CPO or perhaps 2). Most submarine officers are qualified submerged Officer of the Deck (OOD) in 2-ish years (don't quote me, it's been too long for me to trust my memory on this). I am not sure that SWO nukes even go to nuke school right after graduation, a friend's daughter (USNA Grad around 2002 I think) spent a few years on a CG or something before getting orders to nuke school.
As far as the tight-knit crew goes, I will tell you that I am still in touch with 20-25 people from my SSN (things like Facebook and LinkedIn helped with getting back in touch)...and any of them would be welcome in my home tomorrow, and I'd probably have a huge headache the next day.
Here's a link with some good general info.
http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/faq.html