I joined the Connecticut in Tacoma, WA on March 2, 1989 as a supernumerary.  The ship was on the Valdez run at the time. Although nothing had been said by the office, Capt. Usher advised me that he would be retiring after this trip and that I would sail as Mate for this work cycle and then be his permanent replacement when his next work cycle was to start.  It was not to be.  Just 3 weeks later, on March 24th, the Exxon Valdez grounded on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound.  That not only altered my status, but changed the whole industry as well.

We had sailed from Valdez exactly 24 hours before the Exxon Valdez and thus encountered almost identical conditions when passing by the Columbia Glacier.  I was on the bridge at the time and due to the many small bergs that had drifted into the narrows, we had to pull out of the channel to go around them.  The difference between us and the Exxon Valdez was that when we cleared the bergs, we steered back into the channel and proceeded without incident.  The next day, we heard the news on the radio about the Exxon Valdez grounding..

After discharging, we returned to Valdez for our next load to find that the terminal was now only working one ship a day so we had to anchor and wait our turn.  I had never been ashore in Valdez but this trip I took the opportunity to do so.  Valdez was a small town and the busiest store was the one that sold T shirts.  There was literally a line out the door of people wanting to buy Exxon Valdez oil spill memorabilia.  The majority of these folks were Exxon employees sent there to help deal with and mitigate the situation.  The lady sales clerk routinely asked each customer where he was from.  As happenstance would have it, the gentleman in front of me told her he was from New Jersey.  A light bulb went off in my head.  My daughter had told me that one of her high school classmate's father worked for Exxon in the Marine Dept.  I wondered if the guy in front of me in the checkout line could be him.  I took a chance and asked him if he lived in a yellow colonial house on Sanford Ave.  He gave me an incredulous look and asked me how I knew that.  I told him that his daughter and mine were good friends and that I had dropped my daughter off at his house numerous times.  Talk about a small world.

I went on vacation the second week in April in Anacortes, WA.  My wife and I had scheduled a Club Med trip to Guadeloupe which we barely made due the slow down in Valdez.  I wore one of my Exxon Valdez oil spill T shirts to lunch there one day and had an egg thrown at me for wearing it.

I rejoined the Connecticut in Anacortes in early July.  After two voyages we were scheduled for drydock at Swan Island in Portland, OR.  We stayed there three weeks before it was time for me to go on paid leave again.  In those days, our contracts had been renegotiated and we were working 2 months on, 2 months off.  Upon returning to work again in November, I was pleasantly surprised to learn the ship had been chartered by BHP for the Hawaii run.  I rejoined in Honolulu.  The Hawaii run was a triangular-shaped one from Long Beach, the SF Bay area and Hawaii.  Every 2nd or 3rd trip to Hawaii, we would dock in downtown Honolulu for part discharge.  It was convenient to everything Honolulu had to offer including Hilo Hatties where I always managed to buy another Hawaiian shirt.  At Barbers Point, off the southwest end of Oahu, we would fully discharge and then backload for California.  The round trip usually lasted around 3 weeks.  I happened to be Master when Texaco, clearly as a reaction to the Exxon Valdez incident, decided to rename their ships, changing the Texaco name to Star so we became the Star Connecticut.  I had the Texaco Connecticut name boards put ashore for storage in Long Beach in care of Costello Ship Supply, our ship chandlers.  Lord knows what happened to them. The Hawaii charter lasted until November 6, 1990 when misfortune caused the vessel to ground while unmooring from Barber's Point, HI.  I was home on paid leave at the time.

The Connecticut was in the process of being sold to Coastal when the grounding occurred so I was going to wind up on another ship even if the grounding hadn't happened.  That next ship turned out to be the Star Massachusetts, my old home in the mid-70's.  I joined her in a familiar spot, Swan Island Shipyard in Portland.  The shipyard screwed up some specs there.  Since the ship would be carrying MTBE and Ethanol cargoes, special gaskets and valve packing were required.  The shipyard used the wrong valve packing material so when we tried to discharge our first cargo, the tank valves started to leak badly and we couldn't fully strip the tanks, even internally.  I sent our spare tank valves ashore for repacking and then started replacing valves each trip as more valves were repacked.  It was a pain in the neck process but we were able to stay fully operational.

The one incident I clearly recall happened the first week in December 1990.  We had orders to load at Cherry Point, WA, a port in northern Washington not far from the Canadian border.  Hurricane force winds delayed our docking and we had to anchor until the weather subsided.  We needed to use both anchors.  When I went to the bridge to relieve the 2nd Mate at 0345 the next morning, upon checking our position I immediately noticed we were dragging anchor and heading directly for a shoal.  I called the Captain (Louis G.), had the deck gang roused and headed to the bow.  It was still blowing 80 knots and the temperatures were below freezing.  One could only stay on the bow for around 15 minutes so the 2nd Mate and I alternated with the deck crew in heaving up the anchors.  It was a very slow process, made slower by the fact that the ship had swung and the anchors crossed.  Luckily, the anchors eventually cleared each other and we were able to get them home safely and maneuver away from the shoals.  We wound up slow steaming back and forth in the Strait of Georgia until the weather subsided and we were able to dock.

I only made one work cycle on the Star Massachusetts before being reassigned to the Star Montana, one of my favorite ships.  I stayed assigned to the Montana for a year and was pleased to be reunited with Captains Healey and Calhoun.  The Montana was rumored to be the next ship scrapped which upset Capt Healey.  He did everything in his power to get the ship in spit-spot condition to give the Company second thoughts about scrapping such a well-maintained ship.  One of the projects he wanted done was scaling and repainting the forward pumproom.  This pumproom was only used for bunker fuel transfer and had been neglected for years.  Being such a confined space, the noise that reverberated from the pneumatic scaling hammers was deafening.  We wound up painting it with left over boot-topping paint which was bright red in color.  It was something to see.  Unfortunately, it didn't save the ship but did enable the deck gang to make a lot of overtime.

Captain Healey retired off the Montana and was replaced by Capt Chester, another old friend and shipmate from the Minnesota and Connecticut days.  During one interesting stretch, Capt Porter filled in.  We had orders to load in the LA area and head back east, discharging in Guatemala, El Salvador and Panama along the way.  One grade of cargo we carried on that voyage was dirty diesel, and it clearly was off-test from the start.  During the loading, the off-test diesel was blended with clean diesel.  The ship was given several 55 gallon drums of chemicals to dump in the cargo tanks just prior to arrival in San Jose, Guatemala.  The chemicals were intended to mask the impurities in the diesel cargo during sampling and apparently the process worked because the cargo was accepted.  San Jose was an offshore mooring similar to those I had called at while assigned to the Minnesota so the entire discharge process went smoothly.

From San Jose, it was only a few hours run to Acajutla, El Salvador.  The terminal in Acajutla was open to the sea and there was a significant surge at the dock.  We deployed plenty of extra mooring ropes and managed to discharge and then depart without incident.  From Acajutla, we went to La Union, a small port on the border with Honduras.  Upon arriving at the pilot station, the pilot embarked from a dugout canoe.  That shows you how much of a backwater port La Union was.  We docked alongside a warehouse.  I had gone ashore in San Jose and Acajutla to buy souvenir T-shirts but there was nowhere to go in La Union.  After departing La Union, it was on to Cristobal, Panama where I went on paid leave.  The only thing of note here was that I got to take the train across the isthmus.  There wasn't as much to see as expected, the views if the Canal often being obscured by jungle.  I had to spend the night in old Panama City before catching my flight the next day.  The hotel tried to rip me off.  The next morning when I went to check out and sign for the bill, my dinner bill included 8 beers and several glasses of wine.  I had ordered 2 beers with dinner and don't drink wine at all so I put up a stink and refused to sign.  The tab was being paid for by the shipping agency and I'm sure they just paid it as presented; there was probably a kick-back involved.

My last go 'round on the "Queen of the Fleet" was from February until April 1992.  She was scrapped shortly thereafter.