My next assignment was as Captain on the Mississippi, relieving my good friend JPK in Wilmintgon, NC.  The Misssissippi, originally a T-2 named South Mountain, was built in 1944, renamed Mississippi in 1950 and Texaco Mississippi in 1959.  She was jumboized in 1964 in Newport News and later renamed Star Mississippi in 1990.  She was the last remaining Texaco T-2 and was sold and scrapped in 1992.  She was primarily a lube oil ship and was of riveted construction.  Because of her lube oil cargo history, her steel hull remained in excellent condition but unfortunately some of her rivets had begun to weep and, riveting being a lost art, there was no effective way to remedy this problem.  Her time was soon to be up.  As happenstance would have it, many of the officers onboard had recently attended the same Quality training course in Portland, ME as I had, which made for good communications and a very smooth running operation.  Ports called at during that work cycle included Port Arthur, Port Neches, Baytown, Texas City, Houston, New York and San Juan.

San Juan was always an interesting port to enter.  With all due respect to the harbor pilots there, it had been my experience that some of the pilots had become spoiled by working ships that repeatedly called there.  The pilot boarding station there is supposed to be one mile offshore but pilots would often wait and board while the ship was entering the harbor.  I had once witnessed a pilot when first boarding having to shout "hard left, half ahead" from the main deck to the bridge in order to keep the ship from running aground.  I wasn't about to let that happen to me as Master so I had a minor stand-off with our pilot when we first arrived.  He wouldn't come out to the pilot station and I wouldn't come in closer to shore.  We compromised and I picked him up a half mile out and all went well.
 
On one of the trips we got orders to load in Houston at the Lyondell berth.  I had never been to that terminal and it started out as a contentious stay.  After docking, the ship was so positioned that we could not use the long ship's gangway.  We carried a shorter gangway just for instances like this and we rigged the short gangway on the foredeck.  The terminal representative refused to come up the gangway saying it was a barge gangway, not a ship's gangway, which was of course absurd.  Even after showing him the gangway specs sheet and approval document, he wouldn't come aboard.  There was a shore gangway laying on the dock so I asked if we could use it instead.  He then told me we'd have to rent it from him for $200.  So this whole gangway charade was a scam to get us to pay him to use the shore gangway.  This probably worked on foreign flagged ships and I didn't expect it to work with American ships but when I called the office to report the incident, surprisingly they told me to go ahead and pay the guy which I did.

One northbound voyage was eventful.  My standard routine after dinner was to hang out in my cabin for a bit while a few of the Mates went up to the bridge for coffee.  I liked them to have time for themselves without me hanging around.  Anyway, my phone rang and I expected it to be the Mate on watch letting me know there was fresh coffee made.  Much to my surprise, he asked me if I wanted to do a rescue at sea.  He was fairly nonchalant so I really thought this was just an invite for coffee.   When I got to the bridge, he pointed over the side and lo and behold we were passing a guy floating in a large life ring.  At the time we were approximately 20 miles northeast of Miami.  I immediately put the engines on stand by, phoned the engine room to have them ready to maneuver, and called the USCG for their assistance.  We proceeded to make a Williamson Turn, required in man overboard situations, and maneuvered close by the man the life ring.  I had the deck crew put a pilot ladder over the side and shouted through a bullhorn to get him to paddle or swim over to the ladder so he could climb aboard.  He kept shouting "tiburon" which meant "shark" in Spanish and was scared to swim to the ship.  He stayed in the life ring until the Coast Guard arrived in a boat some 45 minutes later.  They took him aboard their cutter.  They reported to me that the man was a Cuban refugee and had been in the life ring for 4 days.  I'm convinced that had not our Second Mate (Rick C) stood such a diligent watch and with night time fast approaching, this man would have drifted out of the shipping lanes and never been rescued.

 August 1992 Rescue of Cuban Refugee

During this same northbound voyage, my father-in-law passed away.  The family wanted his ashes spread at sea.  That voyage we called at New York, first anchoring in the harbor off Staten Island while we waited for a berth in Perth Amboy.  I wanted my wife to come aboard at the anchorage so she could make the four hour shift to the dock, as she had never made a trip on board before.  She didn't want to risk climbing the pilot ladder especially with her father's ashes and so she waited to come aboard until we docked.  I spread my father-in-law's ashes at sea two days later on the southbound voyage.

Also on the southbound ship we received word that the ship had been sold.  We knew this was coming but still it was very disheartening to hear.  There would be one more voyage and then the ship would sail for Alang, India to be scrapped.  As a tribute to some of our previously scrapped ships, and to lighten the mood onboard, I allowed the crew to stencil an irreverent call sign graveyard on the bridge wing.

I was due for paid leave and my good friend Capt Bruce Calhoun relieved me in Port Neches, TX.  I was told he also rescued a Cuban refugee during the following voyage.  One rescue is a very rare occurrence.  Two rescues on consecutive voyages is unheard of.  The Mississippi definitely went out in a blaze of glory.

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.

The Mighty Minnie

On Sept 7, 1985 I joined the Minnesota in Long Beach.  Originally named Churubusco when built in 1943, she was renamed Minnesota in 1950 and jumboized to her current configuration in 1964.  She was bound for Gaviota, a port I wasn't familiar with.  It turned that out Gaviota was an offshore mooring in the Santa Barbara Channel, one of many offshore moorings that were part of the Minnie's bread and butter west coast runs. Other moorings we often called at were El Segundo, Port Hueneme and Estero Bay. California offshore moorings were new to me so on first Gaviota trip, I had to stand back and watch the bosun and deck gang do their magic hoisting and connecting the submarine hose.  The routine turned out to not be difficult but you always had to keep safety in mind.  Although I filled in as Master on the Rhode Island at one point, the Minnesota was to be my steady ship until Dec 29, 1988.  Ninety percent of our runs were from Long Beach to Estero Bay.  It was a 15 hour run each way and we usually spent around 15 hours loading San Ardo Crude at the mooring.  That put us in Long Beach at least once a week.  Long Beach certainly had changed since my days there on the Meadowbrook in 1965.  The infamous Pike had been replaced by urban sprawl.  At least the Twin Wheels stayed the same.  The steaks there were good and the beer cold and you could walk there in 15 minutes if you snuck through the fence and took the shortcut through the Weyerhauser terminal.

Estero Bay was a scenic port with Morro Rock being located not far from the mooring site.  Wildlife was plentiful.  It was not uncommon for a whale to come alongside and scratch against the ship, probably shedding barnacles or some other unwanted marine growth.   One time, while heaving up the anchor, a mutant starfish attached itself to the anchor chain.   It was about 6 inches in diameter and had 17 stubby arms.  It was so unusual looking that we stopped heaving and even the captain came up to the bow to see it.  Ramsay, our Jamaican born bosun, decided it was edible and bit off one of its arms.  It turned out not to be edible after all and he wound up spitting it out.

Another time, a small owl decided to hang out in the starboard hawsepipe.  When it came time to unmoor, he would ride up the chain until he was on deck then hop over the side, get back on the chain and ride it up through the hawsepipe again.  Much to our amusement, he did this several times over, treating it like a thrill ride.

In December of 1986, the Minnie was sent to the Hyundai Mipo shipyard in Ulsan, Korea for drydocking. I joined the ship there.a couple of days before Christmas.  At that time, there was only one Coast Guard inspector assigned to Korea.  He came aboard and announced that he was going on vacation until after New Years and that the shipyard was to do no work in the cargo tanks until he returned and had inspected the tanks himself.  It is normal for the USCG to inspect tanks and then write up repair requirements.  It became a problem because the shipyard personnel didn't understand.  As it happens, the Minnesota was the first American flagged ship to ever come to Mipo shipyard.  We were also the first steam ship to call there was well.  The shipyard superintendent assigned to us was the only attendee who spoke English and his English was very limited.  All communications with the work gangs had to go through him.  He didn't understand why I wouldn't let the workers start repairs in the tanks.  For the first week, he came to me every morning wanting to start welding in the tanks.  I finally gave in.  I decided to let them work in only one tank, #1 center.  And I told him that the USCG inspector would be angry and didn't know what actions he'd take.  So a bevy of welders went into #1 center and patch welded the many pits on the bottom.  When the USCG inspector returned from vacation, I explained the situation.  He took one look at the #1 center repairs and immediately said "Replace the bottom."  The shipyard superintendent was furious but had no grounds to stand on since he'd been warned on what might happen.

 Mighty Minnie in Hyundai Mipo drydock Jan 1987

      Mipo Shipyard Jan 1987                                                                Weight testing boom at Mipo 

We stayed in the yard for a month.  When it came time to sail, the Texaco repair rep advised us to return to California using the southernmost route we could to avoid bad weather.  He knew that the ship had sustained multiple tank fractures on the trans-Pacific voyage to the shipyard and didn't want a repeat of this on the way back.  But wouldn't you know, we received orders to proceed to Nikiski, Alaska to load for Portland, Oregon.  The marine office wouldn't listen to the advice of the repair rep.  There was a charter available in Nikiski and so Nikiski it was.  The captain even told the office that we didn't have the required amount of spare mooring ropes for the Nikiski tidal range (we did) in an effort to get the orders changed but the office countered that they would rent them and they'd be waiting for us on the dock.

The North pacific is not the place to be in February.  We were lucky enough to stay between storms on the voyage to Alaska but still managed to take our fair share of seas on deck.  The foredeck steam pipeline being exposed to the weather turned orange and bled rust all over the main deck.  We had no steam line paint on board so the captain suggested we coat the pipeline with bunker fuel as had been done in the "old days."   I was very hesitant to do this and put it off for a few days until I was "reminded" to get it done.  So I had the deck crew slosh bunker fuel on the pipeline as directed and it actually looked good for a couple of days, until a storm caught up with us and we started taking seas on deck again.  The bunker fuel on the pipelines hadn't set up and was easily washed off by the seas, streaking the already orange-stained deck black.  We did not have any degreaser on board, being that it had not been available in Ulsan.  It turned out to not be available in Nikiski either.  The foredeck of the Minnie looked awful.  It was embarrassing to see such a clean ship with rust and fuel streaked all over the deck.

The loading in Nikiski was slow.  Due to the high temperature of the cargo and the cold outside temperature, strict loading restrictions were required and followed.  On the loaded voyage to Portland, we encountered a fierce storm causing the ship to roll significantly.  A loud banging ensued coming from the starboard side almost directly under the midships house.  It was obvious that something in the tanks had carried away.  We thought it might be a ladder.  When the storm subsided, I was able to go out on deck and ullage the tanks in question, 2C and 2S.  2S had been topped off at 4'6" and 2C had been slightly slack upon completion of loading.  When I took the ullages, they were both the same level which meant it was a bulkhead that had caused the banging, not a loose ladder.

We were lucky enough to have good weather for the remainder of the voyage to Portland.  After discharging the cargo, we proceeded to anchor to wash all the tanks and go right into the Swan Island shipyard there.  When we were able to actually enter 2C tank, we found that the longitudinal bulkhead between 2C and 2S had carried away from the underside of the deck and a vertical crack had made its way 20' down the bulkhead, allowing the section to swing like a barn door.  We stayed in the yard for five days while they repaired the bulkhead and welded up a few tank fractures that had developed during the voyage.

So, did the company save money by sending the ship to a foreign yard for repairs?  Probably not in this case since whatever money was saved in the shipyard in Korea was probably spent in the shipyard in Portland.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time on the Minnie and was sad to learn that she was being scrapped.  I was fortunate enough to sail with some really good seafarers there including Ramsay, Robbie, Red, Domingo (Baby needs new shoes), Hans (Kai Wo), Ali and Tony the Pumpman.  She was scrapped in Bangkok in 1989.