By Barry Sutton, RD3, (’59-’61)
Casey Creek, Ky.
Nick Gardner, QM3, and I were reminiscing and sharing some sea stories about the T-bone a while ago, and we talked about the time the stern anchor dropped because someone made a mistake when calculating the distance needed to release the anchor for a landing exercise at Vieques Island in the Caribbean.
When the anchor was dropped too soon, all of the anchor cable ran out and the cable snapped in two, and we were still pretty far from the beach. I became aware of the mistake when I heard the anchor drop and I checked the radar scope, and noticed we were still pretty far from the beach. Then someone ran into the pilothouse from CIC and told the OD that we may have released the anchor too far from the beach.
I opened the back door CIC hatch, and watched as the spool ran out. The cable was silver color but then the yellow came up and I knew we were in trouble. When the cable snapped, the whole ship shuddered, and we kept heading to the beach.
There we were – steaming toward the beach to unload the Marines on the island, and no stern anchor and no way of pulling the ship off the beach – once we got there. Two of us from the Operations Division, SM2 McCoy and I, told the XO that we would try to dive for it if he wanted. He declined saying it was too dangerous.
Well after a while, the CO, Captain Munnikhuysen, got really getting upset; he came to us and told McCoy and me to give it a try. We went out with the deck guys in a small boat, each of us took turns diving down. We rigged up a line with a buoy on it just in case we found it.
Let me tell you, it was over 20 feet down, free diving. I finally saw a groove in the sand, and reached down, grabbed the steel cable and tied the line around it. Then we both dove down and followed the cable toward shore until we found the end of it. We then tied another buoy on it, got a heavy line and attached it to the submerged anchor cable.
The deck crew hauled the end of the cable up while the other crew had the other end fanned out ready to splice it. Fortunately, once we got it up to the surface, we got the cable spliced together and all in record time so that we could get underway, before the command group admiral on the USS Boxer found out about what happened – and it’s a good thing he didn’t know what happened.
Got the worst sunburn of my life, had blisters hanging off my feet, legs, and my back was one big blister. The ship’s chief corpsman, Doc White, put me in one of those marine tubs, which helped soothe my sunburn a little.
Through it all, I give the deck crew and the lead BM1 at the time, a lot of credit for getting that cable spliced back together and allowing us to get off the beach. Another brief, but memorable, sea story of my time aboard the T-bone.