Now that I finally spent some of my saved up renown, I really love my IXc a lot! Especially the quad machine guns and AA gun and especially the snorkel!
On my 30th patrol I was feeling cocky and actually had very calm winds almost the whole patrol! So I was cruising from Bergen to AM16 to begin my patrol. It was a rainy night/early morning and I forgot to tell stupid Hans to not play with the radar when he reported he was detecting radar signals. So I dive down to 14m.

The destroyer that came my way didn't see me and went on his way. The morning was a beautiful clear calm day. I then was told by Hans (as he couldn't keep his hands of the radar I put him on hydrophone/sonar duty to teach him a lesson) that he was picking up some sound contacts off to our NW. With snorkel up we go cruising over there at 12 knots. Well the contacts turned out to be a small task force! There was an escort carrier with 3 escorts guarding him moving along at 9 knots.
One of the escorts heard my loud diesel engines so he came over to investigate. We switched to electric and when he got close we sank him with one torpedo. The other two didn't like that I did that so they started heading over. As they were stationed all around the carrier, they showed up at different times and I was able sink each in turn. Now the little escort carrier was all alone...
He starts pouring on all the speed he was worth. So I raised my snorkel and headed off to cut him off at the pass so to speak.

Two torpedoes later he was history...
I then continue, on the surface going north over Scapa Flow and proceeded to get jumped by some Sunderlands. Felling all full of myself and wanting to try out our new armaments I stay up top and tell the boys to have at 'em.

They sent wave after wave at us and we shot down a stunning 17 planes! Mostly Sunderlands, a couple of B-24s and a Hurricane. It got where they wouldn't try flying over us any more and would only try tossing them at us while turning away.

We surprisingly only managed to receive light damage to the deck gun which Otto quickly repaired while we shot down a couple of more planes. They stopped sending planes after us... Good thing as we were almost out of ammo!
Though they were mighty ticked off at us and sent a sizable force to find us...

They almost nailed us big time! Damaged my lovely snorkel so I couldn't lower it, brought our hull to 47%, and wounded a couple of our boys and destroyed all our new guns. But we pushed on, a lot more carefully this time, and went to our patrol area and ran into a convoy of tankers! Sank 5 of them and a couple more warships before running out of torpedoes. All in all a good 30th mission but now that it will be 1944 next month we really have to play it a lot more conservatively... This crew is really top notch and I don't want to lose any of them. If we play our cards right we may get one of the fancy new XXI boats that are rumored to be in development.