Memories of the
first Westpac Cruise. - (Submitted 11/26/2003)
I reported aboard
about 6 weeks before the ship left for its first Westpac cruise. The following
are my recollections of some of the events that occurred on that cruise. I was
a sonarman seaman at the time, and I had been transferred from the USS
Agerholm, which entered a FRAM (Fleet Rehabilitation and Modernization) project
in Mare Island.
The first significant memory occurred when we arrived
in Hawaii. Captain Robinson (we call him Rembrandt behind his back) waited on
the quarterdeck for the phone to be installed. As soon as the technician said
it was working, he picked it up and dialed a number. The conversation went
something like this: "Hi John, this is Rem. I just arrived with my ship and I'd
like for you to come by an see it."
It turns out that "John" was
CINCPACFLT. That's when I found out that Rembrandt knew every admiral in the US
Navy, their wives and children, and pretty much their life stories.
We
left Hawaii and cruised a bunch of islands between Hawaii and Guam. As I
recall, it took us about 70 days to get to Guam. The ship served fresh eggs for
breakfast every morning. Two days before we arrived in Guam, we ran out of
fresh eggs. Many of the islands we stopped at were uninhabited. On many
occasions we sent a shore party to the island. I don't believe we found
anything significant during that portion of the cruise. There was one island
where we dropped anchor, and the captain got on the 1MC and announced that the
women on the island "weren't wearing jumpers".
We stopped several
places in the Philippines. At one stop, one of the mess men from the officer's
mess was the first person to go ashore. It was his hometown. When the rest of
the crew (who had liberty) went ashore, they were greeted by this guy, dressed
as the rest of the locals - sandals, loincloth, and machete.
We visited
Manila for a few days. As we prepared to get underway, a storm started to brew.
We went from being tied port-side to, to being tied starboard-side to, without
ever shifting colors.
In one of the ports we visited in the
Philippines, the ship was challenged to a basketball game by the local dock
workers. That turned out to be an embarrassment. A bunch of six-foot plus young
sailors playing basketball against a band of five-foot tall Philippine old men,
and we were horribly outclassed and beaten severely. The reason, we justified
to ourselves, is that we all smoked, hadn't practiced together, and didn't have
a strategy. They did have a fast break that caught us off guard and really
racked up the points against us.
I think it was at Davao, in the
southern Philippines, that we participated in some kind of honor guard
ceremony. I don't remember the details, just that we had rifles, but no
ammunition.
We stopped in Hong Kong for a while, and for several days
(it may have been 2 weeks) we were "station ship". We had port & starboard
liberty, and during the nighttime hours, a 3rd class petty officer stood watch
on the bow with a BAR and a full ammo belt. In the ammo locker on the
quarterdeck, which normally held 3 inch ammo for the aft gun, was a shotgun and
a bag of grenades. The OOD wore a sidearm, in addition to the petty officer of
the watch. Rembrandt was paranoid that "his ship" was going to be attacked and
boarded.
Formosa Patrol was another "fun" experience. We were on port
& starboard watches (6 on, 6 off) for so long that when we got into the
chow line, we'd ask one another what meal this was.
A couple of
interesting memories about those weeks:
1. When we got provisions
in Formosa, the grapefruit were huge, almost the size of basketballs.
2. The charts had a line drawn for the 7 mile limit, also known as "the chicken
line", and another line a few miles further to sea, which was supposed to be
our patrol line. Rem drew another line on the charts a few miles further out to
sea. This was "his" patrol line, and the regular patrol line was his "chicken
line."
3. One day on patrol, Blankenship, who was the bridge phone
talker called out "There's a man out there". He had spotted a fisherman on a
raft. We rescued him and returned him to Formosa where he was from. He had been
fishing and drifted too far out on his raft. There was talk of recommending
Blankenship for a life saving medal, but I don't know if that ever happened.
There was a time when we did some exercises with a carrier. At one
point, the fleet was ordered to make 30 knots for flight operations. When the
captain told the admiral on the carrier that we were unable to make 30 knots,
we were sent to do operations on our own. Another time, while operating with a
carrier, we had an encounter with a hurricane. The carrier was taking green
water on the flight deck, and because of our size, we just rode up one wave and
down the backside of it. At times, the fleet disappeared from radar because our
antenna was below the crests of the waves.
We were in Formosa when the
new Commanding Officer came aboard. The change of command ceremony was brief
and to the point. It was less than an hour from the time the new CO reported
aboard to the time that Rembrandt departed.
The new CO (I don't
remember his name), knew every officer aboard, and knew the name of every
chief. The only problem he had was that we had 2 chief enginemen, and he had to
ask which was which.
We left port and that's when the seamanship and
ship handling ability of this new CO became evident. It took only a few lines
in the quartermasters log to get from "shift colors" to "secure the sea
detail". Under Rembrandt, it normally took several pages. |
