I have some interesting rememberances of that cruise as well: I checked onboard in July with a pregnant wife, we were expecting for a November delivery. Underway day from Alameda I'm told to get off the ship by my DivO., seems that my leave was approved. Funny thing was that I never applied for leave and the leave papers didn't have my signature on them until that morning when I came onboard. They were approved by Skipper on my DivO's word alone. I missed the ship at Pearl by about 2-3 hours, the flight took us over the harbor and I saw her leaving. Finally met up with her at Subic. I picked up some balsa wood strips for some fun while I was there and built a box kite with the wood, some shot line from the gunners and some tin foil from the galley and a pilot's distress marker from a friend in VA-196. Had that up on a slow Sunday during holiday rooty-tooty until we had a Flying Squad exercise involving aft O2N2 spilling some LOX. In the excitement, I forgot to bring in the kite.Someone reported that a flashing light was following the ship at nearly 100 yds shortly after sunset. (FlightOps preps) That one bit me in the rear in 1990 when I made Chief, seems that one of our BMC's onboard Pyro was TAD to MAA div. at the time (as a BM2) and pulled the kite in. On the tin foil were a few names from E-Div. and he remembered them all.
Here's to the beer that went to Nimitz,Should we meet we need to sit down, hoist a few and spin some yarns. FW&FS! Bill
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