Not the candidate – the ship. Celebrating the anniversary of the Great White Fleet:
ALL during the night they lined the shores and the docks, bobbed on boats big and small, huddled for space on hilltops outside the city, to make sure they didn’t miss the first glimpse of it coming to Sydney. For there had never been anything like it – anywhere, any time – and they weren’t going to miss it.
It was the Great White Fleet that US president Teddy Roosevelt sent around the world from December 1907 to February 1909. The 16 battleships, all painted white, and a score of escort ships were to enter Sydney Harbour sometime on August 20, 1908, but arrival time was a guess in those days before effective ship-to-shore communications. News accounts say half the city’s population was out before dawn. More than 500,000 people. Perhaps 650,000.
Lucky b*stards. Then and now. You can have all your European port visits – just let the WESTPAC/IO sailor touch at Perth.
Uh, point of order sir. Back in the day, ( When carriers did not enter the Straits of Hormuz and ready rooms got to show good 16mm movies), when yours truly was flying on no fly days looking for a radar track on Miss Piggy, us lowly Med loving Sailors also got to spend time in Perth.
And boy did we have a good time!
Thanks for the kind words regarding Perth – my hometown – both here an elsewhere on Neplex.
In mid-1983 USS Carl Vinson visited Perth as part of her shakedown cruise, and some of her S-3 pilots were dining next to us in a downtown restaurant the night before my 15th birthday.
Somehow, they ended up at my family’s table, and the upshot is that with 24 hours I marked the advent of my 16th year with a private tour of the boat by the XO of VS-29, who, at one stage, left me to watch some short documentary films in the squadron crew room for a while.
He returned after a while with some extra-gooey, improvised birthday cake, sodas and ship’s ball cap.
As birthday presents go, that day was damned hard to beat.
Although…….. I think the cap quickly ended up “borrowed indefinitely” by my sister to wear when working on her tan next to my mother’s pool.
As a Med Sailor also, having been to Perth adn Hobart, I’d say that the only thing that comes close on our side has to be Halifax NS. Especially when pulling in on the Coral Sea as the first Carrier visit in 18 years. second time wasn’t too bad either.
claudio
Completely irrelevant historical fact #227 – many of the streets of Five Dock were renamed after ships of the Great White Fleet, in honour of the visit. Illinois St, Minnesota Ave, etc.
Not many people know that…
1980-1981 on Ranger we were scheduled to hit Perth. Then it suddenly became Columbo, Sri Lanka. 1987 on Hawk, same thing. So now everybody gets Perth?
Same thing happened on America in 1983. No Singapore, no Perth. Instead we got Colombo and Mombassa.
Not a fair trade if you ask me-although I enjoyed the photo safaris in Africa. Sri Lanka-it just sucked with a capital “S”.
*Some* LANTFLT CV’s got Perth – others got…more time underway instead. 347 days worth in one year to be exact (no thanks to Jimmuh).
- SJS
Would something like Indy’s ship visit happen in a foreign port nowadays, post 9/11? What a way to help a kid from a foreign nation have a little appreciation for America.
SJS
Reason #347 why being on a conventional had its advantages over being on a nuke.
Coral Sea was the best of all possible worlds. Lots of time inport, no IO cruises, and no F-14′s or S-3′s.
Skippy;
Were you on CORAL SEA for the ’86 shoot ‘em up?
I got to the squadron (VAW-127) right after that. During the 86 shoot up I was teaching baby moles the finer points of rear conversion intercepts in order to have them help A-7′s to sneak up on Lex unseen.
Point of order: No SLUF jock ever snuck up on me unseen. In a SLUF.
Although I did have the opportunity to have a couple of them wax my fanny flying A-4′s in Key West. Coming out of Hornets, I thought I understood BFM, but that airplane took some flying.
One good point about the SLUF – at least in the late 70′s, as long as they were around you never went C-4 for SAR.
Oh and Skippy – had nothing to do with being nuke as Karachi and Mombasa were offered as alternates, just before we left to begin the trip home the long way, again (no CV’s allowed through the Suez then). Jimmy C. was definitely persona non grata aboard come absentee ballot time…
- SJS
All true about the Coral Maru, Skip, but didn’t all that time spent dead in the water get old?
Flat,
during my 4yrs on the great ship CORAL SEA, I can only remember 2 instances of DIW. One in perilous vicinity to the Hampton Bridge Tunnel. I can’t count high enough with a Cray for all the fires, floodings, etc. BUT, I will tell you that spendind 5 days inport then a 3-4 day sprint to the next port was the best med cruise I ever did. And we were small enough to get in pierside in Halifax thanks to a great OOD. (we fixed the roof we twisted).
Great ship, at least in my memories, at the time as a FR it sucked a good part of the time.
claudio
Claudio, 4 days in port and a sprint to the next sounds like my dad’s first cruise on the Coral Sea. That was 1953ish. He was in the VC squadron. He got like 40 traps the whole cruise.
Claudio has it right. Coral Sea went DIW twice during my time too-once off Jax during workups with a raid inbound. The ship got so hot they were dragging guys up out of engineering in stretchers and lot of people were walking around the flight deck while the orange air aircraft flew overhead unopposed.
Coral Sea also had an interesting electrical switchboard system where whole sections of the 0-2 (O-3 on big CV’s) level would lose power at once. This was the start of when everything was going to computers so there would be a collective scream from 4 ready rooms at once-especially as the skeds O’s were trying to get the flight schedule done.
Skippy, during that DIW you mentioned, I was up for about 48 hrs, then trying to go to sleep, laying in my rack, when the power just diiiiimmmmeeed. Know it’s bad when it doesn’t switch. went back to Main Control and started hauling ice and water/bug juice to the guys in the pit trying to start her up. like I mentioned 15 minute stay time. While going into MC with some ice, some staff weenie, a CAPT I believe who was down there thinking that his presence will make the process go faster, had the temerity to tell me that I was out of uniform since I didn’t have a dungaree shirt. I was a little stupefied, but then CHENG set him straight.
The switchboard was funny, but due to old design, never meant to handle all the trons we were. When I got onboard, we were still using the XEROX computers (not really, just a word processor) with 12″ Floppys. When we got the Zenith 248s, we advanced tremendously (and it got me out of the hole).
neat ship though, believe we finished shaving with her about 10 years ago. Go on the Midway if you want to see what the CORAL SEA looked like about 40 years ago.
It was always a thrill to see the Coral Sea at sea, like going back in time.
Similar feeling to seeing Lexington making way.
Oh Lord!
Claudio mentioned the dreaded Xerox 860 word processors; the bane of my existence as a senior watch officer on a ship where 25% of the crew swapped out every month for years. I had one CO (temporary but a painful 3 months) who insisted that all watchbills include the name, rate (easy), watch station, date of PQS qual, anticipated date of PQS qual if UI, etc. I would carefully pull all that crap together for the at-sea watch bills (Condition I, II, III, IV), the in port watch bill and then turn them over to the ship’s yeoman who would pull up the last watch bill on his trusty 860 and sort of change the old one. I knew this because I would proofread the product before signing and forwarding to the XO and CO and find the names of guys who rotated off the ship MONTHS ago along with totally garbled qual dates. This would happen 3 or 5 times and I was living on 3 hours sleep a day. The ship’s yeoman and I reached a meeting of the minds. He would TYPE on a typewriter each new watch bill and I wouldn’t put him on port and starboard at sea and in port unless he brought me one more watch bill that contained typos.
Oh GOD I hated those machines. I set up a GQ drill in the ship’s office and let the response party spray PKP into the damned space from ehll and it still didn’t kill that thing. I put it under the leakiest scuttle on the ship and sprayed firemain on the scuttle for an hour one day and it still didn’t kill it. Xerox built their crap word processors like the guys that build crypto machines. Indestructible.
Curtis, Agree totally. The worst part is that when one of the screens broke, it cost 2000 dollars to replace it. still blows my mind. I had a similar agreement with the MPA re errors. Back when CASREPS were done on OCR typewriters. And on the CORAL MARU, we did a LOT of CASREPS. Good times
Hey Claudio, just finished touring the Midway with my two sons and mom’s new boyfriend, a Master Thief who took a voluntary paygrade reduction from Warrant in order to increase his retirement.
Great to be back on the flight deck, loved the cat officers and LSOs from the ‘old days’ who volunteer their time to teach the arts to the civvies.
My kids got to sit in the fat fans of the Viking – they’re tied off with cables so they don’t snip little curious fingers.
… and now they know what their Dad’s jet looks like up close. My first son was born a week after my squadron decommissioned.