I mean when travelling I walk, a car drives, a plane flies and a ship sails. What does a submarine do? Just another pedantic thought that will take up permanent residence in my head if I don’t find an answer.
I believe that submarines also “sail”, similar to other motorized, non-sail driven seacraft. But feel free to invent a new word for it.
How about “submarinate”?
I’m pretty sure they say “sail.” Which isn’t any less accurate than an aircraft carrier or battleship “sailing.” So they do.
The OED under definition #2 for “sail” the verb (first sense of the word) says
I would assume that “on water” and “under water” would both apply here.
Aren’t submarines always called “boats” and never “ships”?
The OCD defines “cruise” as:
After spending years watching old submarine movies (Das Boot being #1), I can tell you that they do “set sail,” even underwater. I have heard the term “cruising” quite often, but it’s always in reference to the speed or (less often) the depth.
Submarine OODs (Officers-of-the-Deck) generally refer to themselves as “sub-drivers,” so I guess you drive a sub.
For a sub on patrol (especially SSBNs, or “boomers”), they are often said to be “drilling holes in the ocean.”
Boomers are also said to be going “3 knots to nowhere” when on deterrent patrol.
Formally though, I agree, subs “sail” the oceans like any other vessel.
Generally, yes, which is actually kind of odd if you consider an 18,000 ton Ohio-class “Trident” sub. It’s quite a bit larger than many surface combatant ships.
[sub]Ha! I beat Tranquilis! He’ll be around soon enough, though. :)[/sub]
In practice, I should add, a submarine at sea is simply “underway,” as opposed to being “in-port.”
–robby (ex-submarine officer)
There’s a general rule of thumb that says “ships carry boats”. If the vessel carries other vessels (e.g. liferafts), it’s a ship. I don’t know that this is a completely correct definition, but it’s how an old navy guy answered this question for me.
Yes, but all ships at sea are underway, no?
Yes, sufrace ship are technically underway when away from the pier, but surface ships usually “sail”, while subs “get underway”. Trust robby: He may be a useless “O” Ganger, but at least he’s a Nuc. 
Submarines are “Boats”. Period. Surface ships carry boats, but submarines are boats, too, and if you call a sub a ‘ship’ to a submariner’s face, you’ll get an annoyed look at the flat minimum. More likely you’ll be corrected, maybe rudely.
Most certainly. My point simply was that this is the expression submariners use to describe “sailing” at sea.
Most of the expressions I mentioned in my first post above were just slang. And you really don’t hear folks use the term “sailing” much either. I suppose you might hear someone say that we “sailed” from Groton to our assigned operating area, but they would be more likely to say that we “proceeded” there (formal), or just “went” there (less formal).
If I were trying to describe the condition of a submarine at sea in a legal record, such as a log book, it would be “underway.” I’d also indicate whether it was “submerged” or “surfaced.”
The full log entry would read something like the boat in question is “underway, proceeding submerged at 10 kts to assigned op area.”
[On preview, I see that Tranquilis finally snuck in.]
–robby (useless “O” Ganger) 
Late for watch, again. Guess I’ll have to clean the bilges, hmm…? 
I’ve had this discussion concerning great lake freighters with a friend who is a naval architect. He is adamant that they are ships, and that ships carry boats. On the other hand, when I worked on these ships, we referred to them as boats.
Naval Architects design things that float, but sailors give them life and soul. Trust the sailor.
To answer the OP, the tour guide at Norfolk Naval base called it “cruise” or “cruising”, when one of the tourists asked a similar question. (Wasn’t me!) Also, Subs are called “boats”, which I assume is called so because of WW-2 era U-Boats.
Plato? Aristotle? Socrates? Morons!
~Did you kick him in the head? Did you see the blood run down? -Better Than Ezra
Since this is apparently a sub-mariner reunion of sorts I’ll take this opportunity for a slight hijack.
An acquaintance had a ex-husband who was in intelligence with the army and although very talented with languages was something of a major screw up as an field intelligence officer and recently got yanked back to the states after his latest professional misdemeanor to teach languages.
According to her one of his favorite stories at parties was describing how he got shot out a submarine tube for one mission where they could not deliver him to shore or surface. It occurs to me that this would kill someone if the tube is designed to fire missiles weighing thousands of pounds.
Is being shot out of a submarine tube a feasible scenario if the depth is not too great? Just curious.
The story sounds like a load of B.S. to me. I don’t think being launched out of a torpedo tube is survivable. If I heard such a story being told at a party, I would have difficulty keeping a straight face.
If you wanted to leave an unmodified submerged submarine, you would do so from one of the two escape trunks (go figure).
Subs equipped to deliver personnel (such as SEALS) actually use an attached dry deck shelter, described here:
Actually, robby, the torpedo tubes can be used to get swimmers out of the boat, but the swimmers aren’t impulsed, they swim (wriggle) out. If they were impulsed, the swimmer would become a 21" diameter slug of compressed flesh about 2" thick. Yummy!
I’ve seen the ‘swimming out’ bit a number of times, but then I belonged to a specops squadron when I was still in boats. Most other boats would never see this.