We are at anchor after a day allegedly spent at Holiday Routine. I had the midwatch and went to bed at 0430. Up at 0745 I took the 0800-1100 Officer of the Deck watch and listened as the world went crazy. I watched as USS Enhance led MV Gas Princess, Ocean City, USS Merrill, USS Joseph Strauss and two other tankers through the Q-Route to Kuwait.
Their helicopters reported that they were hovering over mines so we got underway, dropped a Mk-6 mine shape and continued on to USS Trenton where we waited for two hours for USS Inflict to finish refueling. The mines were later found to be fishing buoys.
We pulled alongside Trenton at @ 1500 and took on fuel and stores and got rid of 6 drums of 2190 TEP oil that aren't going to haunt me now. At CO's wish we were underway as soon as possible and went back to our anchorage area with Marine Recon divers to fish out our mine shape. The bozos in the Combat Information Center were unable to vector the ship back to the shape so we spent a fruitless 3 hours trekking around and finally delivered the Marines home dry.
Went to anchorage where it was Bob's turn in the barrel.
The good news was: yesterday I fixed the governor problem on #3 Main Engine that had baffled 5 of my senior engineers for hours. Today they fixed the #1 Main Engine after finding 4% fuel oil dilution caused by a broken rocker arm(?) It was a really good day for us engineers.
I think I'll throw in the previous couple of weeks starting tomorrow and cover my view of Operation Praying Mantis which was the last time I swept actual mines in the Gulf and we made war on Iran.
8 comments:
Always enjoyed setting Holiday Routine ,quickly followed by set the refueling detail or set the rearming detail. Good days
Shit I might have been on the Enhance that day.... Did 2 tours on her from 87-89.. Fun then but not looking back..
Was Bill Snyder the CO?
The name isn't familiar, maybe between rotations. My first skipper was a CDR Wironko, or something like that. We went through like 2 or 3 ROV's because he wanted to play with them and kept running them through the screws. My 2nd skipper was a surfer type dude from San Dog, that loved to drive the Marine recons IBS's around the boat. He took me out once and it scared the shit out of me with him laughing like a screw ball. Like I wrote, fun then but not looking back..
Love the story , reads like log entries , you have a good memory , Thanks !
I just missed Wironko in the States but the second guy was clearly Wild Bill Snyder. He started out in PT boats at SPECBOAT. I enjoyed the hell out of working for him back in San Diego.
I wrote it all down back then thinking I was living in interesting times. I kept the journals. That phrase to the side of my blog, off PIM, steaming in company was how a lot of my midnight logs were written as OOD on my first ship LaSalle when I’d take the midwatch. We were always off Plan of Intended Movement and steaming in company with a shooter when inside the Gulf at the height of the Tanker War.
Good grief, I'm getting a flood of memories. On one of my tours, my XO had this plastic duck he called, Desert Duck. One night a sonar tech buddy and I decided we were fed up with the damn thing, so we grabbed it and hung it up on the starboard yardarm.. The signalman on watch, another good buddy, said I didn't see a thing. When the sun came up that morning and the crew saw the duck swinging in the breeze, the shit hit the fan, but the XO was cool about it. A few days before at about midnight, we were called to GQ, because the damn Iraqis would fly down the gulf towards our anchorage, then turn toward Iran and fire their Exocet missiles. It was something knowing your on a 50 year old wooden boat with fighters inbound. Exciting times..
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