Friday, July 07, 2006

Lightship Frying Pan:

For the finale of this story, we rode out Hurricane Donna. I was on the bridge with the Executive officer, Boatswain Mate Chief Eugene Pond (now Deceased). We were watching the anemometer (wind measuring device when at 100 mph, the needle went to zero. We thought it had twisted the cable off but later we saw that it simply was blown away. We had what we estimated at 50 foot waves.  We tied a line down through the interior of the vessel running fore and aft. It was our only means of not getting thrown around, we all had our life jackets on and we were literally scared to death. And we were a seasoned crew, I already had a hitch in the Navy beforehand. We took one roll of 70 degrees and didn't know if we would right or not.


11:26 AM